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This is really, really sound advice. Even if you could incubate future 'unicorns' in the UK, the liquidity needed for them to scale and compete globally is in the US. It always will be. So, consider what makes good social policy first.

This

😂

* I once lost a poetry recital competition judged by the (teetotal) Irish critic and historian Owen Dudley Edwards on the grounds that, because I was (probably) quite a nice person, I couldn't do full justice to the voice of the poem I had chosen to recite - Larkin's 'Sympathy in White Major'

Also tells us quite a lot about what Philip Larkin persistently represents in the broader cultural imagination, despite his own well-documented (and unpleasant) views.

This is brilliant. A forensic piece of cultural excavation that goes right to the heart of Burnham, and New Labour's, ideas about class and patriotism, through the lens of Burnham's defence of Larkin, and might tell us something about the kind of politics PM Burnham will espouse.

Wallace Stevens once started a fight with Hemingway in Key West, only for Hemingway to 'put him down several times', knocking him into a puddle. Stevens broke his hand punching Hemingway on the chin, and was holed up in his room for 5 days afterwards. www.kwls.org/key-wests-li...

Tempted to ask: what's the point of criticism that isn't a little spicy, anyway?

ofc, in her essay she offers some personal reflections (some of which are spicy) on the film, but also v much in the style of a typical LRB piece, but the thrust of her essay is a comparison between the film and the poem. It's not just a film review as such.

A lot of people getting very exercised about Wilson's piece in the Review yesterday. It might be wise to remember that she is a Professor of Classical Studies writing an essay for the London Review of Books, not a film critic writing for, say, Variety or Sight & Sound.

Whatever you think of Christopher Nolan's 'Odyssey' or the Discourse around it, I'd highly recommend this podcast in which Emily Wilson discusses the film in relation to Homer's poem with Thomas Jones. It is a really interesting conversation. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/t...

let's hope they never find out about this guy

Well, you've all gone and nuked www.lrb.co.uk and there I was, looking forward to a nice quiet read of a couple of poems by August Kleinzhaler, James Meek on container ships, Mark Ford reviewing new biographies of Trollope. I hope you're happy with yourselves.

... and so the significance of a director like Christopher Nolan is magnified out of all proportion to his abilities, because he makes Hollywood feel that it retains its cultural dominance but that it is also capable of 'serious works of art'. Not his fault. But here we are.

Have a - not very original - pet hypothesis about the film industry (Hollywood), that it suffers from a classic superiority/inferiority complex - superiority because it believes it dominates our cultural attention, inferiority because it doubts the value of its own products as works of art ...

Pol Estrada is the bright new star in Catalan fiction. His debut collection of short stories ‘Els Arbres no s’ho Mereixen’ (The Trees Don’t Deserve It/That) has been widely praised and his style has drawn comparisons with Quim Monzó and Sergi Pàmies. For me, he has a touch of Joan Barril as well.

characteristically good, I might add

@stephenkb.bsky.social v. good on Nandy & DCMS: '... it is an unusual choice to expand the responsibilities of a secretary of state who has shown so little desire to do anything of note in the old department. ... ... [handing] an expanded empire to someone with little interest in administering it.'

Fire in the hole! www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

My friends at the Rebecca Swift Foundation do tremendous work in, as they put it, putting women poets on the map. They need your help to get some breathing space so they work out their strategy for the next few years. If you can, please do: justgiving.com/campaign/wom...