John Baker’s Blog

Nobel Prize winner, J.M. Coetzee, gave the National Book Critics Circle a list of five books he believes reviewers should have in their libraries.
The Iliad. - the standard for the narrative of action.
Aristotle, Poetics. - the terms for all later debate on the truth claims of history versus the truth claims of poetry.
Cervantes, Don [...]

Sanjay Subrahmanyam on a new book of essays by VS Naipaul: A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling
. . . Naipaul began his writing career in England after getting a degree from Oxford (where he had been sent on a scholarship from Trinidad in 1950). In 1957, Naipaul was befriended by Anthony Powell, [...]

In casual conversation all speakers slur vowels, drop final consanants and take short-cuts through syntax. Don’t tell me this only occurs with people on the lower rungs of the social scale. If you believe that, you haven’t learned to listen yet.
In the latest post in this series I suggested that speech transferred to the page [...]

By the time she began this, her eighth novel, Sarah Dunant had certainly learned how to open an extended narrative:
My lady, Fiammetta Bianchini, was plucking her eyebrows and biting colour into her lips when the unthinkable happened and the Holy Roman emperor’s army blew a hole in the wall of God’s eternal city, letting in [...]