From the Bowen-House letters, Julia Parry has managed to carve an absorbing concoction of curiosity, melancholy and ultimate contentment; “a feeling of gratitude” for the stories and talents she has inherited from her family. Acquiring the letters was itself a lesson in both “the power of objects to choose their human hosts” and ““the power of letters to let loose their spirits, enabling them to seep into the present”.
Genealogical charts are indispensable for at least two sets of people: those intrigued by the British Royal Family, and those trying to decipher the kinship pretzels in small communities where families have intermarried and interacted for decades.
W.S. Winslow’s début novel, “The Northern Reach,” supplies lineage diagrams for the latter category as it tells an episodic and generational tale about several families in a coastal area of Maine.
As a media form, video games are situated at the interface between the subjective/personal and the social/communal; they are the product of a certain historical and political moment, and they embody its logic. But they also have the potential to lay bare the contradictions and distortions of neoliberal subjectivity. The great hope of game designers/players/lovers is that this potential is realized. My great hope is that they do so with and through this exceptional book.
The great diarists get away with it. No matter how foolish or spiteful or pompous they appear in print, they transcend faults of character by the simple virtue of brilliant writing. Only it’s not that simple – if it were, everyone would do it. In the first half of the 20th century, no diarist in English would achieve greater notoriety than Henry Channon, AKA “Chips”, his name practically a byword for gossipy flamboyance and indiscretion. When first published in 1967, nine years after his death, the diaries were an instant sensation, a stunning fresco of the British social-political haut monde by an American interloper whose eye never seemed to sleep.