Harry's Place Arts

Cross posted from For All and None: An interesting article at the BBC website on plagiarism in the internet age begins: A German minister has resigned after copying huge chunks of his doctoral thesis, while the London School of Economics is probing whether Colonel Gaddafi’s son lifted chunks and used a ghost writer for his [...]

This is a cross post from For All and None, my occasional blog for more off-beat topics: Thomas JJ Altizer is, for me, the one truly fascinating theologian of the 20th Century, and remains today the one theologian whose vision and writings continue to captivate me, in spite of my complete unbelief. Altizer found himself [...]

This is a cross-post from More Media Nonsense I’m a great fan of the Victorian novelist George Gissing (“the English Zola”) and one of George Orwell’s favourites. Many of his books are out of print but thanks to Project Gutenberg all can now read his collected works on-line. Reading “The Crown of Life” (a lesser [...]

Howard Jacobson can write prose in a rhythm that can really move you along.  I’ve just picked up Roots Schmoots and come across this paragraph:- I don’t recall any family rambling or cycling, but we could  have rambled or cycle, so many resemblances did we bear to the cheerful, thoughtful, self-improving gentile lower-lower middle classes [...]

Chapter 1 “You’ve done well, Nicky,” said Duke, as they sat in the back seat of the bullet proof car. “You’ve pulled that party together. It was a rag-tag mob of criminal gangsters and street fighters before you re-organised it.”   Nick Griffin bent his head. “All learned through you, El Duke.” Only David Duke’s [...]

Radio 4 are currently broadcasting The Death of Grass [caution spoiler], part one and two of which are on iplayer. After overcoming the difficulties of taking the likeable David Mitchell seriously as a narrator, I’m finding it an interesting distraction. I always thought John Christopher’s Death of Grass was under-rated in comparison to Day of [...]

I get my books lukewarm from the library rather than hot off the press so I’ve only just read Zoe Heller’s The Believers. I liked her Notes on a Scandal, which was an amplification of the lines “People in love cannot be won by kindness, And opposition makes them feel like martyrs.” The martyr in [...]

Last week National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” program featured a segment about a couple of guys who have spent years collecting old Jewish musical and spoken-word vinyl LPs from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and have written a book about them. I’m sure their collection includes several albums by Mickey Katz. Katz was a [...]

Having read Hitchens on the film adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, I then had another go at the novel, which I used to think over-written and absurd. I was especially uncharmed by the winsome Sebastian and his teddy bear.  Evelyn Waugh’s prose is economic as a rule, sometimes to the point of sketchiness; in Brideshead Revisited [...]

Can I draw your attention, dear HP readers, to Liverpool’s wonderful Swine Magazine – a worthy online successor to irreverent ‘zines like The End and Boys Own.  Whatever your opinion of football hooliganism (and as a workshy bourgeois southern fop with no real interest in football let alone fighting, I’m at very best ambivalent towards [...]