Colin Burrow is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. His books include Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity and Imitating Authors: Plato to Futurity, as well as editions of Ben Jonson, Shakespeare and the metaphysical poets. His first contribution to the LRB, in 1999, was on British and Irish poetry of the Civil War; he has since written more than seventy pieces for the paper, on subjects from Catullus and Virgil to Hilary Mantel and Ursula Le Guin.
Matilda sold half a million copies in its first six months. It isn’t true that half a million people can’t be wrong, as anyone who’s ever scanned the results of an election will know. But Dahl aimed to sell, and his worst writing derived from his aggressively simple-minded view of what children want: ‘They love ghosts. They love the finding of treasure. They love chocolate and toys and money.’ Some do, some don’t, surely?
The problem with Wilde is not just that he and every character he created always sound like they’re quoting Oscar Wilde, but that after him quotations that didn’t sound at least a little bit like Oscar Wilde were unlikely to be quoted, because they didn’t sound like quotations.
Despite his intellectual origins in ordinary language philosophy there is something profoundly unordinary about Stanley Cavell’s syntax, in its refusal to let words rest, or to arrive where they seem to be going. This style, clotted, retortive, says to its readers: ‘Paraphrase me if you dare, for I have still secrets from you.’
‘Pope has had bad luck,’ F.R. Leavis once declared. It’s true that his reputation suffered a big dip in the 19th century, but otherwise he did pretty well for himself, all things considered. He was only four foot six and suffered from curvature of the spine in an age when physical disabilities were often taken to imply moral deformity. He was a Catholic during years in which
The boundary between the broader and narrower senses has never been firm, and the history of literary imitation has always been bound up with the histories of philosophy, rhetoric and education. Plato
I must needs acknowledge, that the Greeke and Latine tongues, are great ornaments in a Gentleman, but they are purchased at over-high rate. Montaigne, Essays I grew up in postwar
In his own time, Shakespeare was much better known to the reading public as a poet than as a playwright. Venus and Adonis went through ten editions before his death in 1616, and another six
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