Alan Ross

Alan Ross is the editor of the London Magazine. The second volume of his autobiography, Coastwise Lights, was published in 1988.

Poem: ‘G. Lineker’

Alan Ross, 6 December 1990

A style suggested by a name, A way of comportment, of playing – In the merging of ‘line’ and ‘glint’ Necessary elusiveness, hint Of mother of pearl, ‘nacreous’, As in the opening, knife-edged, Of two halves of an oyster.

In the music of Satie there is Similar opportunism, echoes And chances taken up, exploited – ‘Striker’ and...

Letter

Sunk without trace

6 December 1984

SIR: Why does A.J.P. Taylor assume that because people are dead they have automatically ‘sunk without trace’: in this instance, Julian Maclaren-Ross and Cyril Connolly (LRB, 6 December 1984). The fact that Maclaren-Ross’s Memoirs of the Forties has just been reissued by Penguin and is reaching more people than he ever managed to reach in his lifetime is surely proof to the contrary. Similarly,...

The war is a long way back and young people take little interest in it, or in the feel of what was being said and written at the time. Lawrence, Yeats and Eliot go marching on, attracting...

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The Pain of History

Stephen Brook, 19 February 1981

Derek Walcott is now 50 years old, but there is none of the placidity or mellowing of middle age in The Star-Apple Kingdom. If Naipaul is the great novelist of the colonial experience, Walcott...

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