The second meaning of irony is less than a couple of centuries old. And it was invented by one guy: an English bishop and classical scholar named Connop Thirlwell, which seems like a typo but isn’t. His 1833 essay “On the Irony of Sophocles” begins with a discussion of the traditional meanings of the term, then pivots to the notion of “practical irony.”
The Roding is London’s largest forgotten river. From its source at the perimeter of Stansted Airport, it fidgets its way south through the Essex countryside, reaching London’s outer limits just shy of Epping Forest. Here, it endures every modern indignity: scythed by motorways and concrete bridges; choked with sewage and rubbish; canalised, fly-tipped, retail-parked, thickened with the polluted slime of London clay. It is a forbidding place to call home.
Yet on a cold winter day in 2017, that is exactly what Paul Powlesland - a boat-dwelling barrister with a penchant for trees, rivers and psychedelic cat leggings - set out to do. An ongoing dispute with the Canal and Rivers Trust (who manage 2000 miles of Britain’s waterways) left Paul looking for a fresh place to moor his narrowboat, and a dream to make the mooring matter. “I wanted to be able to have an impact on the area I’m living in” he tells me by phone call, the Roding’s huge reeds visible over his shoulder, “rather than having to ask permission all the time to do something good.” His vision was a boating community with a difference. Rather than pay dues to a landlord, marina or regulatory body, it would pay them directly toward the transformation of the river itself.
Many of the region's first commercial vines were planted in the mid-1850s by European settlers who experimented with varietals from Bordeaux and other popular wine regions in France and Germany, curious to see whether they would flourish in the sun-splashed, temperate climate and rocky soil. But California might never have earned such viticultural acclaim if it weren't for the little-known story of a Japanese immigrant named Kanaye Nagasawa.
Born into a samurai family and smuggled out of Shogunate Japan, only to become a founding member of a utopian cult and eventually known as the "Wine King of California", Nagasawa led a life that was stranger than fiction. At the peak of his influence at the turn of the 20th Century, Nagasawa was operating one of the largest wineries in California, producing more than 200,000 gallons of wine a year from the vineyards of the 2,000-acre Fountaingrove estate in Santa Rosa.
This novel by Zhang Yueran, a bestselling author in China from the “post-80s generation” – millennial to you and me – arrives in English on a wave of praise from Junot Díaz, Yan Lianke and Ian McEwan. Cocoon, translated by Jeremy Tiang, addresses the impact of the Cultural Revolution on China’s younger generations, and has the force of a story that needed to be told.
What Nick Hornby—novelist, screenwriter, and critic—arrives at is the revelation that Prince and Charles Dickens have a lot in common. In his new book, Dickens and Prince, Hornby lays out this improbable theory, which is rooted less in any obvious similarity (there are none) and more in Hornby’s intuitive sense that both men are what he thinks of as “My People—the people I have thought about a lot, over the years, the artists who have shaped me, inspired me, made me think about my own work.” A bold, perhaps even presumptuous claim, but one Prince himself might have admired, if Hornby can make a persuasive case for his theory.
I was never good at Tetris.
I watch you move the L block,
turn it so it fits with I.
You don’t know I know
you’re trying to arrange memories
into an order that makes them disappear.