The Brooknerian

In terms of your professional life, what particularly attracted you towards the eighteenth century?   The Enlightenment, and the fact that it might just have come out right. The Romantic movement came along and bowled it all over. I do like a rational world, rational explanations and good humour and fearlessness [...] Kitty Maule says about Romanticism that in certain situations reason doesn't work, and that's the most desolating discovery of all. Haffenden, Novelists in Interview , 1985 During her three postgraduate years in Paris in the Fifties, sitting daily in the old Bibliothèque Nationale in the rue Richelieu, Brookner read her way across and through the eighteenth century. (Her days in the library were powerfully described in an article in the Times Literary Supplement I no longer have a reference for; she was once, I remember, the recipient of a bunch of flowers from a gentleman admirer.) In my own way, though I've gained more pleasure from the Victori...

Those who raise admiration by their books disgust by their company, said Samuel Johnson. He goes on: A transition from an author's books to his conversation, is too often like an entrance into a large city, after a distant prospect. Remotely, we see nothing but spires of temples, and turrets of palaces, and imagine it the residence of splendour, grandeur, and magnificence; but, when we have passed the gates, we find it perplexed with narrow passages, disgraced with despicable cottages, embarrassed with obstructions, and clouded with smoke. The Rambler , No. 14, 5 May 1750 She was witty, glitteringly intelligent, reserved, and unknowable beyond the point she herself had already decided upon. I can’t think of a novelist less likely to write an autobiography. Julian Barnes in the Guardian , 18 March 2016 ( Link ) Unknowable beyond the point she herself had already decided upon : 'I am not about to reveal all,' she told one of her interviewers. Let us consider onc...