A Private Place – Amanda Craig

I once read a description of the great British Public Schools (a strange term; they are not for the general public but are fee paying schools for the elite) as ‘concentration camps run by paedophiles.’ How my heart would sink when I was reading an English novel and the son reached the age of seven. I knew the mother would be distraught, the father resolute; the child, like his father before him, had to be sent away to boarding school. Whether it was Eton, Rugby or Harrow, the poor innocent had no idea what he was in for.

W. S. Merwin: The Solstice

Meeting the Devil- A Book of Memoir

The Gerts have long been devoted readers of The London Review of Books (known as the LRB to the cognoscenti). We have passed our copies on to friends and family and have surely accounted for the rise in subscriptions from our harsh brown land. The journal is issued fortnightly, is closely printed, and amounts to around forty-one pages. They no longer have the amusing lonely heart entries in the back pages that used to divert us in the past, but there is always something humourous, infuriating or enlightening to read.

Margaret Oliphant: Hester

Let America be America Again

Langston Hughes, the African American writer who was a leader in the Harlem Renaissance wrote Let America be America Again  in 1935. I quote a couple of the most telling sections below. Eighty-five years after they were written they are still relevant.

It’s all happening for Gert: Boris, teeth and toads

Good Women – Jane Stevenson

I encountered Jane Stevenson when I read in The Guardian her assessment of the work of Margery Allingham.

“It cheers us up”