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"McWilliam, Candia"
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I WAS LUCKY; 20 YEARS AGO I WOULD HAVE BEEN SECTIONED
[...] in a cruel twist of fate, this book-loving, magazine-devouring author was dealt an even bigger blow: losing her eyesight to a little understood medical condition [Eire Region] In 2006, anxious about money and aware that I was about to start out, aged 50, on a life alone, in Oxford, a city in which I had taken 20 years not to feel at home, I accepted an invitation to become a judge of the Man Booker prize for fiction.
Newspaper Article
Reviews: Without a Backward Glance: Ghosts at Cockcrow: Selected Poems: A First Sighting: Versions of life
Physically, this creamy book with its dainty type is an elegant production, and prettily tall in the hand. It is made to last, on comfortable paper, so that its pleasure and durability conspire with one's reaction to its contents, which range from squibs in Scots (\"A Bit Sonnet, or In Memoriam Jimi Hendrix\") to list-poems that achieve precision caught in memory. [Ron Butlin Barzan Press] is a daring and travelled poet who is able to adduce even Mozart without the sensation of that numinous name-dropping which is a hazard of the poetry of cultivation. Here is a poet with whom it is good to drink absinthe, as in a tribute to the great Edwin Morgan, and who is as unafraid of declaration: I confess I was unprepared for the next two books. [Robert Crawford Jonathan Cape] is a poet of reliable intelligence, sure, detailed voice and wide referential force. I always anticipate with relish his next book. His Selected Poems is a revelation. Crawford is a very fine poet indeed. This book is aglitter with surprises, with new ways of seeing, (\"frittered silage bags\" on Uist), of hearing (\"Your language lives with a tube down its gullet\"), and of feeling (the poem \"Ripening\" in which he considers the tempering of his own father's tweed jackets in their cupboard). Generosity has brought [Henry Marsh Maclean Dubois]'s A First Sighting (ISBN: 0- 9514470-1-7) into being. It is printed by a small press, Maclean Dubois, can also be bought online (enterprises@edinburghacademy.org.uk) and its sponsor is the remarkable Professor Alexander McCall Smith. Its author, a teacher from Broughty Ferry, began to write \"only\" in the year 2000, upon the death of his friend, the bard Donald MacDonald of South Lochboisdale.
Newspaper Article
A life in tiny pieces ; Michael Holroyd's second volume of autobiography leaves us wanting more
Basil Street Blues told of its author's parents and their origins and fates, the secrets and sad hopes that sustained and betrayed them. As Holroyd makes clear in Mosaic, though somehow without sacrificing that nice confident modesty that is, almost, his only palpably Etonian trait, the response to that first book was considerable and profound, from reviewers certainly, but also, and most seriously, from readers. In a curious way it seems to me that Mosaic is an always- questioning struggle against Gwen John's bleak truth, just as the author's own life has constituted a graceful reconciliation between a writer's hunger for time and solitude and the soul's thirst for response and companionship. For Holroyd is a public man with a private temperament, who has chosen poignantly to head a chapter of Mosaic with Auden's words: Private faces in public places Are wiser and nicer Than public faces in private places. The depradations on the Holroyd Trust, executed by professionals over the long years of the decline of the author's oncelovely aunt Yolande, are feelingly dealt with: \"We are foreigners in our own country. The land is reverberating to the sound of competing languages, and becoming filled with expert interpreters - business consultants, financial advisers, internet teams, text-talk specialists, scientific popularisers, literary critics, political columnists and 'spin doctors' - translating one English language into another, trying profitably to treat layers of verbal ignorance.\"
Newspaper Article
A hard sell that misses the point
AN adjective of praise much spangled about is \"mineral\" . Well, [Gordon] is a veritable mine. It reads more like a case history than a novel, with the implausible yet perfectly authentic detail pinning into truth the flow of narrative. The authors of whom I thought as I read were Anna Kavan and Anita Brookner. The presiding moods are those of pain and control, the prevailing temperature cool, yet the book is not, as its pimps would have you believe, a hotbed of S&M. Louisa loves Gordon, her older psychiatrist lover, because he knows her before she knows her own self. So he maddens her. He refuses to praise her beauty, which, undescribed, we clearly see. To Gordon alone, in the beautiful words of her author (and acknowledged double), she \"opens up\" her hair.
Newspaper Article
Life's small things writ large ; ENGLISH CORRESPONDENCE by Janet Davey (Chatto, pounds 12.99)
That's a pity. It's a book about slippage, and the mortal import of small things. Its occasion is death, the death of George, father of Sylvie, who is herself half-French, half-English. She is married to material, very French Paul and they run a provincial French hotel. They have a son, Lucien. Sylvie has corresponded with her father but his last letter unaccountably does not arrive. One of the crucial incomprehensions between Paul and Sylvie occurs over a bunch of flowers intended for the wife of the man who simply, fatally, bursts in their restaurant; Paul, whose mental podginess is beautifully conveyed, suspects that Sylvie, heretofore well-regulated, may be batty enough to send the very same flowers to the widow in condolence. Against loss, Sylvie acts. She brings herself and those around her into zones of risk. From the darkness, she rescues hope, beauty, sex and jokes; against the darkness, she sets clear eyes and a heart willing to rise high.
Newspaper Article
A WORLD AWAY FROM DAME EDNA
MORE Please, Barry Humphries's first autobiography, was a worthy winner of the JR Ackerley Prize, a real prize from the bookish world and one not touched by hype or razzmatazz. Humphries understands minutely such distinctions. His appetite for the quiet and hidden is gargantuan, just one of the paradoxes that drive his daemon. My Life as Me starts as its predecessor did, in the early childhood of (John) Barry Humphries, son of Eric and Louisa, in Melbourne. It's the same, and different, story, differently shaped by the palpable happiness and sense of homecoming that have arrived with the author's marriage - not his first - to Lizzie Spender, and, one senses, into her family. Humphries is a terminal sufferer from, and beneficiary of, oral rage. He loves oysters (there is a dazzling uncomfortable story about von Ribbentrop in this connection, among, perhaps, 200 such stories, not one sounding less than fresh); a passion for oysters is the first test of the maniac for talk, company, words, love, things. And Humphries likes his oysters with caviar, which is, of course, what he offers his audiences. He piles Pelion on oyster.
Newspaper Article
Review Laureate still in Motion
Not only is [Andrew Motion] an attentive writer of elegy and even nostalgia, he is a keen recorder of how it feels now, in this instant, to be alive. Salt Water extended his already impressive range in this regard, adding to his acknowledged mastery of certain kinds of (very English) mood and tone a harsher voice of wide lament, occasioned by the sinking in the River Thames of the pleasure boat The Marchioness, with friends of the poet aboard - young, beautiful, bright, and drowned in black water.
Newspaper Article