Boris Ford

Boris Ford an emeritus professor of education at the University of Bristol, is the editor of the New Pelican Guide to English Literature and of the Cambridge Guide to the Arts in Britain. He is now editing a series of books on the arts and civilisation of the Western world.

Letter

The Buttocks Problem

5 September 1996

Paul Foot’s reference to F.E. McEachran as a rare and civilised teacher is, I suspect, more ironic than he realises (LRB, 5 September). For when, in the Thirties, McEachran was teaching at Gresham’s School in Norfolk, he became involved in a farcical and rather tragic episode to do with beating that resulted in his resignation.McEachran was one of those eccentrics who are only employable at independent...
Letter

My Nirvana

19 October 1995

Duncan Campbell’s review of The Autobiography of a Thief (LRB, 19 October) convinces me that it must have been Bruce Reynolds who delivered one of the great utterances of the 20th century, one that should not be lost to posterity. He was being interviewed on Radio 4 about the possibilty of Biggs returning to England and was asked what people like Biggs and himself hoped to get out of big robberies....
Letter

Gentle Questions

6 April 1995

Peter Wollen’s copiously documented article (LRB, 6 April) about Virginia Woolf’s involvements with British feminism, European Modernism and its attendant sexual revolution, and with her own social-intellectual milieu raised an uneasy question or two in my mind. For in the midst of his 630 lines there appear the following six: ‘James King’s new biography, punctilious but pedestrian, gives us...
Letter

The Good Old Days

26 January 1995

In his account of the political and ideological circumstances in which the Beveridge and Borrie Reports emerged. Ross McKibbin describes the remarkable ‘politicisation’ of many in the Forties ‘for whom overt political discussion had been hitherto unacceptable’ (LRB, 26 January). He attributes ‘the intensity of public discussion’ at that period in part, at least, to the publicity given to...
Letter

Doggerel

4 August 1994

Gerald Long’s assertion that ‘there are no limericks in French’ (Letters, 18 August) reminds me of a dilemma that faced me some years ago when I was invited to deliver the concluding speech at an Anglo-Canadian conference of adult educators. I was required to provide a commentary on the discussions held during the previous three days, and thus the speech had, in theory, to be composed at high...

Seeing through Fuller

Nicholas Penny, 30 March 1989

It has been respectable for some while now to admit to being bored by the huge, flat, ‘pure’ abstracts on the white walls of the museums of modern art. And yet non-representational...

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Textual Harassment

Claude Rawson, 5 April 1984

In a recent review in this paper, Edward Said used the word ‘narrative’ about thirty times. This might have seemed a lot even in the present state of litcritspeak, and even in an...

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Moments

Marilyn Butler, 2 September 1982

It is a current preoccupation on the Left, more fashionable now among many students of English than Post-Structuralism, that English Literature as an academic subject is a conspiracy of the...

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