The people of that plainly built farming town led simple lives and were proud of the hardship and forfeiture rural existence assumed of them. They knew their place in that world and – as is customary in such isolated surroundings – they conducted themselves with the same sheltered constancy as so many of their forebears had done for generations before.
Tag: writer
The Romans and the Moralists
I am half way through rereading Augustus, a suberb novel by John Williams, author of the equally brilliant Stoner and Butcher’s Crossing, and noticed this particularly eloquent passage that I had overlooked the first time through. The quote is taken from a fictionalised 12BC letter from the political advisor Gaius Cilnius Maecenas to Titus Livius and…
A Long Walk Through The City
Soon we found ourselves in Bloomsbury where around every corner you half expect to find T.S Eliot or Virginia Woolf stood in discussion with one of their literary acquaintances from that little bourgeois social circle of theirs. When Americans see London in their movies, says my old man, this is the London they are seeing.