The Brooknerian

Another delightful vouchsafement: on YouTube, the full 1984 Booker ceremony:

What do you do when you've finished Henry James? You reread, of course - recommended for many authors, though usually I leave at least t...

A welcome arrival on YouTube: a recording of the 1984 Booker Prize dinner at which Anita Brookner learned of her win. Brookner's surpris...

Brookner's second novel, Providence , published in 1982, has several extended scenes set in Kitty Maule's tutorial room. For Kitty M...

Although he set out to be a man of letters, he did not in fact write much until the active part of his life was over, and this of course is ...

For Christmases of the classic Brooknerian sort, one heads to Fraud (see here and here ) and A Family Romance ( here ). A later Brookner, T...

When I arrived in the college, I had already moved about a good deal among the layers of society; and I had not come to the end of my journe...

Clowns do not make one laugh. Undersized, deliberately grotesque, on the verge of tears, they induce discomfort. Their function is to be hum...

Objectively speaking, I was not too badly affected by Covid. I stayed out of hospital. I got better. But I had it before it was a common exp...

'Mute oblongs' Brookner calls the photographs Herz lugubriously sifts in The Next Big Thing . A photo sets the ball rolling in Famil...