Ian Hamilton

I have already reported here, in verse, on my recent trip to a Conference on Literary Journals in Canberra, Australia, and on the death-struggle that did not take place there, but perhaps should have, between – shall we say – Theory and Practice. I won’t go into all that again, although there is plenty more that could be said. By someone else. My own role at the conference had little to do with debates about critical theory. I was there as a kind of relic from the past, as someone who used to edit ‘little magazines’.’

Not actually spoken by the Convener of a Conference on Literary Journals held last month at the Australian National University at Canberra

We’re gathered here today In Canberra To discourse on The Literary Journal: It’s role – Now, Then, Tomorrow afternoon, when (by the way) We have a change Of personnel. Jon Culler has got toothache; In his stead (relax, you kiwis), An...

Your solicitor and mine sit side by side In front of us, in Courtroom Number Three. It’s cut and dried, They’ve told us, a sure-fire decree: No property disputes, no tug-of-love, No bitching about maintenance. Well done.

All that remains Is for the Judge to ‘wrap it up’, and that’s how come We sit here, also side by side (Although to each of us we are ‘the...

Julian Barnes once trained to be a barrister and he’s been asking questions ever since – questions, mostly, about questions. In Before she met me, the hero of the book actually suffered from interrogation-mania: try as he might, he couldn’t stop himself wondering about the details of his wife’s past loveaffairs. In Flaubert’s Parrot, the narrator is a biographer – another snoopy type. In his case, even the answers to his questions are really questions-in-disguise. In Barnes’s books, people don’t get worn down by compulsions of the flesh, nor deranged by the pursuit of fame and money: they fall victim to exhaustion of the brain – they become, as Barnes himself might put it, all quizzed out.’