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IN PRAISE OF DARKNESS

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  Thơ Mỗi Ngày IN PRAISE OF DARKNESS Old age (the name that others give it) can be the time of our greatest bliss. The animal has died or almost died. The man and his spirit remain. I live among vague, luminous shapes that are not darkness yet. Buenos Aires, whose edges disintegrated into the endless plain, has gone back to being the Recoleta, the Retiro, the nondescript streets of the Once, and the rickety old houses we still call the South. In my life there were always too many things. Democritus of Abdera plucked out his eyes in order to think: Time has been my Democritus. This penumbra is slow and does not pain me; it flows down a gentle slope, resembling eternity. My friends have no faces, women are what they were so many years ago, these corners could be other corners, there are no letters on the pages of books. All this should frighten me, but it is a sweetness, a return. Of the generations of texts on earth I will have read only a few- the ones that I keep reading in my mem...
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Drinking by the Rules

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  Obituary | Drinking by the rules Humphrey Smith dictated what a good pub should be The lord high brewer of Tadcaster died on June 19th, aged 81 Save Share Photograph: The York Press Jul 16th 2026 | 5 min read Listen to this story W hat makes an ideal English pub? In a book review of 1946, George Orwell knew. In his favourite, The Moon Under Water, the clientele were mostly “regulars”, “who occupy the same chair every evening and go there for conversation as much as for the beer”. The fittings were “uncompromisingly Victorian”, from the grained woodwork to the cast-iron fireplaces. The house had neither a radio nor a piano, and any singing “is of a decorous kind”. Humphrey Smith took this to heart. As owner for nearly four decades of the proudly independent Samuel Smith Old Brewery in Tadcaster, North Yorkshire (estd. 1758), he wanted his pubs to fit Orwell’s template. And there were a lot of them: almost 300 scattered up and down Britain, mostly in small villages in the north, ...
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Paul Celan: A Life

  Paul Celan: A Life by Anna Arno (Translated from Polish by Soren Gauger) - review by Charlie Louth Charlie Louth Where Books Were Alive Paul Celan: A Life By Anna Arno (Translated from Polish by Soren Gauger) Belknap Press 416pp £29.95   Paul Celan, generally reckoned the most important postwar poet writing in German and perhaps any language, thought that ‘true poetry is antibiographical’, though he also insisted that not a single line he wrote was not linked to his existence. Either way – and there is in fact no contradiction here – knowledge of his life is extremely useful when it comes to reading his poems. Anna Arno’s accomplished biography, which first appeared in Polish in 2021 and has been smoothly translated by Soren Gauger, is now by far the best account available in English and has a claim to be the best tout court .   Celan’s life is of great intrinsic interest. He was born in 1920 in the city he called Czernowitz, though its official name by then was Cernăuț...
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