John Baker’s Blog

There will be time . . .
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; T.S. Eliot

Masks are void of all substance. They hide identity and project the image of another personality.
In tribal societies the mask is used to protect the individual from isolation, and to unite [...]

John Webster’s Dutchess of Malfi, probably based on actual events during the sixteenth century, begins as a love story, with a Duchess who marries beneath her class, and ends as a grisly tragedy when her two brothers seek their revenge, destroying themselves in the process.
The play has been mocked by modern critics for the excessive [...]

Novelists do not write into a void. They require an answering response, an audience of readers outside their family circle, and they also need the approval that professional publication brings. Next week, next year; surely she would hear soon. This hope must have remained with her, but the impulse to produce more novels withered.
It might [...]

We were at Hermione Lee’s lecture at York University last evening. She began by quoting Virginia Woolf on memory:
That is, I suppose, that my memory supplies what I had forgotten, so it seems as if it were happening independently, though I am really making it happen. In certain favourable moods, memories - what one has [...]