10 good things about barney skin#

Which probably means we owe it all to Yeats, really, as it was him who told Synge to hit the road and get exploring. I can't help but think of Synge as the father of everything worth anything in writing on these islands. Travels in Wicklow, West Kerry, ConnemaraВ - Synge This is the sound of an old way of life as it retreated in the face of the industrial revolution an invaluable window into who we were, and therefore who we are. The reason Woodham Smith obsesses me is that no one has quiteВ told the story of what happened to rural England when the corn laws were finally repealed to allow grain into Ireland - but Hobsbawm begins the project with this study of the fire that swept through the country when the nineteenth century was young. It's superlative writing: it's also urgent politics. This is a book about a genocide perpetrated against the people of Ireland as a result of political passivity in and around Clapham common.

Woodham Smith lays out the limits of ideology, shows us the moment when laissez-faire economics can't bring more food into being for a country as it suffers.

On this occasion we behaved like we deserved quality, and beauty, and intelligence, and exceptional things.В It was one of the most heartening events of recent years.ДЄnyone interested in the politics of this Conservative moment needs to read this book. An object of extraordinary power andВ heartbreaking emotional depth was brought into the light, and we recognised a good thing when it came along, and valued what it had to say. We hurtle endlessly towards the lowest common denominators of who we are and what we're capable of. Much of the time, the waves that pass through our society strike me as sources of collective shame. I thought the rediscovery of his work was a moment of great wonder, a moment of great hope, for the culture we live in. It's probably deeply unfashionable to recommend Williams these days, but I want to say something political about him. There are lots of Salter masterpieces - Solo Faces and The Hunters are novels I love very much - this is a great place to start though. His ability with a sentence is peerless no one writes more beautifully. This was the first Salter novel I read, and it's perhaps the most seductively, astonishingly written. The extraordinary, moving, heartbreaking onceness of it all the limits we're all born into the briefness and vastness of things. I've never read a book that felt more immediately like an expression of what being alive is like. I've read most of Hardy's output, and it feels half-treacherous to recommend one over the others but as a Salisbury boy who made his way to Oxford, this novel hit me like a wave when I discovered it. That's what realВ detail makes possible - a glimpse at the universal.

10 good things about barney skin#

Berger's work is the result of an immersion in a French peasant community by getting so deep under the skin of a place, he's also able to tell a big story about the life of a culture, the lives being lived in our world. These stories are a high-watermark in the political project of the socialist century. The wit of these books, their intellectual sophistication - they're magnetic. Those kinds of superlatives are silly, really, but in the face of this achievement, these extraordinarily moving novels whose technical achievement is jaw-dropping, there's nothing else you can say. To my mind,В St Aubyn is the greatest living English writer. The Patrick Melrose novels - EdwardВ St Aubyn I love all his books: I recommend A Long Long Way as a work of particular emotional power. Drawing on the lives that came before him to weave narratives of extraordinary dramatic power that open up the history of a nation in a way that makes you read and read compulsively. Photo: Sunrise over Salisbury (c) Matt GibsonД«arry's project is the exploration of his cultural history through the history of his family.