Saturday linksies
Posted a number of interesting links separately as a specifically IBARW post.
Article about Louis Grassic Gibbon's wonderful A Scots Quair.
Jenny Diski codslaps a couple of accounts of male middle-life crisis woez:
Both men are writing in and of their late 40s, complaining about finding themselves stuck in the human condition, suddenly aware that, quite possibly, there's less time to come than there has been already. For my money, Mark Steel whines better. It used to be that men went all weak-kneed and mortality-conscious in their 30s, but it takes longer to grow up these days. Just imagine how those of us in our 60s are feeling, and man up, guys.
Nicholas Lezard designates Anne Billson's collection of film reviews Spoilers his book of the week, even though:
Someone doesn't seem to have a lot of confidence in this book. It's tiny - you could fit it in your trouser pocket - there's no price on the cover, I've never heard of the publisher, and it was posted to me from, unusually, Jamaica.
(It's published by lulu.com, which I had a vague knowledge of, even before visiting its website, as a self-publishing enterprise.) Nonetheless, he liked it a lot
Billson gets the point of the films she sees; her digressions, few though they be, are always relevant and amusing; she is never obnoxious; and though she is, as all critics have to be, opinionated, I thought of Kael only once, and that was something along the lines of "why do women make such good film critics - or is that in itself a sexist observation?"
Yo: CA Lejeune for the win, too!
John Crace condenses Rebecca.
Now out in paperback: Alison Light's Mrs Woolf and the Servants and Katharine Whitehorn's Selective Memory.
Oliver Burkeman suggests that sometimes, you can buy happiness with less money than you think: I'm pretty sure that somewhere in one of the collections of Whitehorn's columns there is one that makes precisely that poiint: if something is that important to to you, you may be more motivated to go for it and to hell with people thinking you are weird or financially odd.
Review of a book on longevity which claims that a Sir Thomas Harvey performed the autopsy on Old Parr - ahem, I suspect that would be William?