John Baker’s Blog

The Australian novelist, Patrick White, left behind a box full of papers which have been stored in the Australian National Library.

Out of the boxes came extraordinary treasures: photographs of the young swell at Cambridge in the 1930s; precious letters saved from the thousands he’d received in a long lifetime; the old man’s beret and beanie; theatre programs from four continents; a pile of recipes in his own hand; and the carbons of half a dozen brutal letters of dismissal of old friends, old agents and politicians he’d once supported.

“In the days when we spoke from the same platform I believe we were on about the same issues,” he wrote to the NSW premier Neville Wran in 1985. “Since success grabbed you, you have become a megalomaniac politician more interested in votes and your own glory than in human beings.”

The Nobel laureate with more than a dozen books in print earned less than $7000 in royalties in the six months before he died.

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The Technorati Link Count Widget is a tiny snippet of javascript which shows how many blogs link to your posts. This is a possible future solution to the problem of comment spam?

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Some words that may come in useful:
Adroit: Having ready skill, dexterous, active, clever.
Encomium: A formal or high-flown expression of praise; a eulogy, panegyric.
Rubric: A class or category.

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Petrona has this little gem for the coming season:

This Christmas, most people will play as safe as the bookshop buyers and walk out with a Jeremy Clarkson or a Gordon Ramsay, happy in the knowledge it won’t be them who has to read it.

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