Prose Finds

My aim in this sub-section is to link through to articles, already freely available on the web, which strike me as embodying the ideal combination of contemporary relevance and journalistic know-how. Some of them might go against my personal opinion in the first department, but they have all impressed me in the second. A web-site like Arts and Letters Daily does its best to reproduce all the worthwhile articles currently available in the English language, and I often consult it myself; but you could stay in there forever just to keep up, and only a small proportion of the gathered material is well enough composed to be worth studying for its technique. There is a good case for taking other sources into account while making a less generous selection, concentrating only on the work that might achieve permanence by the author's skill, style and power of analysis. Here, each piece is introduced by a paragraph from me in which I presume to evoke its wider context, but I make no claims to universality of view. The choice is purely personal. But then, so is the whole website. I'm simply making a bet that what interests me might interest the visitor.

(Painting: "The Keep" by Peter Kettle)