John Baker’s Blog

Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian Online discusses George Steiner’s My Unwritten Books, and along the way turns up this extraordinary confession:
It really is a brilliant article: angry, personal, affecting, terrifically written. It deserves to be anthologised. I actually dug it out today from a pile of old magazines. It is in the Summer 1991 [...]

If the tale cannot be printed as it is written, down to the very last semicolon and comma, it must gracefully accept rejection. Excision by editors is probably the one reason why no living American author has any real prose style…
HP Lovecraft

Michael Berry has published five writing lessons from Lovecraft, together with his own commentary. [...]

The German film, The Lives of Others has been released as a DVD. Paul Cantor has an extensive review of it in Christianity Today, claiming it to be the best feature film début by a director since Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. My own review is here.
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Do read Alex Witchel’s piece in The New York Times. [...]

I had read several reports of Doris Lessing’s acceptance speech for the Nobel prize in Literature, but only found the full text by accident. Strange how we fall into these traps. I know the media will rarely give me the whole story, and what I read will be a garbled report missing the essence of [...]