Thursday 13 October 2011

Book news

It's been a joyous week for book purchases: all sorts of things have been flooding in.

Peter Day's Franco's Friends, detailing the support afforded British Intelligence to the fascist rebel who conquered Spain.

Richard Mabey's The Unofficial Countryside, about all the scrappy bits of land we usually ignore, and which I particularly love: railway sidings, abandoned industrial quarters, factories and canals. I shall use it for my lecture on the City and Psychogeography.

Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot. It got a stinking review in the LRB, but it's a romance set in the critical theory culture wars of the 1980s (which I missed). What's not to like?

Two variations on the vampire tale: Matt Haig's The Radleys (Radio 4-loving suburbanites discover why they need a lot of Factor 50) and James Lovegrove's political, dystopian Policing the Damned.

Claire Flay's PhD-based biography of Dorothy Edwards: finally a serious (though short) work on this semi-forgotten and fascinating author.

And a print-on-demand copy of Nahum Tate's happy-ending Lear for comparative purpose. The foreword brazenly announces that he's cleaned up Shakespeare's 'Quaintness of Expression' in the original, which he likens to 'a Heap of Jewels, unstrung and unpolisht'

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