Sublime

Patrick Leigh Fermor would be quite high on any list, starting with The Traveller’s Tree, a wonderful book about the Caribbean, absolutely splendid. Everything he does, he has a sort of magic touch with. And I think Evelyn Waugh is very observant, very funny. I’ve read his books more than once.

And so the “thief” moment is the moment of prose—the moment I go after in my writing. I never achieve the regularity of “Tinker, tailor/ Soldier, sailor.” I’m trying to achieve melodic and rhythmic beauty in prose that is expressed here in this nice little so-called poem.

I typed the usual something: “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party.” Or maybe it was the one about the quick brown fox jumping over the lazy sleeping dog, which uses all 26 letters of the alphabet. I don’t think I did “Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs,” that printer’s darling, which uses the 26 letters more succin

You could argue, quite correctly, that in all of these examples, whether commercial or literary, the ellipsis is completely unnecessary – and you would be right. These sentences would stand alone well enough without them. But, as Stephen Fry says of swearing being criticised as ‘unnecessary’: ‘It’s not necessary to have coloured socks. It’s not nec

To point out other people’s errors was a duty that Mr Bulstrode rarely shrank from,

Gilbert Keith Chesterton—that Catholic equivalent of Hotei, the “laughing Buddha”—who, though neither a great poet nor a great theologian, had the sort of bewitched imagination from which great poetry and theology can be made. He shone as an essayist and fantast, and of all his many essays the most profound and provoking was “On Nonsense,” the

At their best, puns are a celebration of language’s slipperiness, its lack of control, its multiple meanings and its pleasures. Alexander Pope said that puns speak ‘twice as much by being split’.

L. N. FOWLER

In both examples each line contains a single thought that finishes with the line. This is called end-stopping, which we could mark like this. The woods decay, the woods decay and fall ⊡ I haven’t time to take your call right now ⊡