Reader's Digest: December 22, 2022

No attempt at a theme, today, just quotes from essays I’ve been reading.

File this one under “aptly-chosen adjectives”: Breeze Barrington on Katy Hessel’s “rejoinder to Ernst Gombrich’s seminal but male-dominated” history of art, in the TLS.

Also in the TLS, the poet Craig Raine is unreasonably harsh about the poet Simon Armitage, who had criticized Elizabeth Bishop’s “excessive” use of simile. File this one under “apt (over)use of a figure of speech”:

In his Oxford lectures, A Vertical Art … Simon Armitage inspects the impeccable poetic returns of Elizabeth Bishop like a team of accountants carrying out an independent audit. It’s like one of those random, routine Inland Revenue selections.

(For what it’s worth, I though the Armitage book was both funny and fair.)

Not from the TLS: the editors of n+1 on the ugliness of contemporary urban design. Here the sparkle of the prose brings out, by contrast, the dreariness it describes. Worth quoting at length:

Dodging huge grilles we walk on, pull…