Creases in the tissue

  .. as you get to know Europe

  slowly, tasting the wines,

  cheeses and characters of the

  different countries you begin

  to realise .. the spirit of

  place. Just as one particular

  vineyard will always give you

  a special wine with discernible

  characteristics so a Spain an

  Italy, a Greece will always ..

  express itself through the hu-

  man being just as it does

  through its wild flowers.

 I don't believe the British

 character, for example, or

 the German has changed a jot

 since Tacitus first described

 it; and so long as people keep

 getting born Greek or French

 or Italian their culture produc-

 tions will bear the unmistakable

 signature of the place.

 Greece, for example, cannot have

 a single real Greek left after

 hundreds of years of war and re-

 settlement.. Yet if you want a bit

 of real live Aristophanes you only

 have to listen to the chaffering

 of the barrowmen and peddlers in

 the Athens Plaka. Even a reserved

 British resident will begin using

 his fingers in conversation..

Lawrence Durrell

Landscape and Character

The [Sunday] New York Times

June 12, 1960

Spirit of Place

 Letters and Essays on Travel

Alan G. Thomas, editor

Leete's Island Books

New Haven, Connecticut

1969©

The native taste

So many of them went out walking,
so many of them untentative. If a
cadence is native to the English,
is it the footfall, shedding boy-
hood, stamped by Fielding's Joseph 
Andrews, and rich tradition since,
which marks their alien vistas as
domestic nourishment, achieved? 

               My chief object in settling in Spain
               was to educate myself. Four years on
               the modern side of a public school 
               followed by four years spent in the
               war had left me very ignorant about
               many things that I wished to know. I
               had therefore shipped off to Almería
               a number of wooden cases packed with
               books that I had selected with care.

               This immense panorama gave its char-
               acter to the humble village that
               looked out on to it. It could never
               be escaped from and it dwarfed every-
               thing else. In summer when the sun was
               high it became a pulsating jangle of
               reds and yellows and magentas in which
               nothing that was hard could be distin-
               guished; then in the evening the shapes
               reaffirmed themselves while mauve and
               lilac tones gave a look almost of trans-
               parency to the mountains of the coastal
               range. In storms the scene became dram-
               atic with mists swirling by and great
               rainclouds piled overhead, while at
               night.. the stars glittered as fierce-
               ly as they do in deserts.

               

Gerald Brenan

Personal Record

  1920 - 1972

Alfred A. Knopf, 1975©

Jack Adair-Bevan

Paûla Zarate

Matthew Pennington

Iain Pennington

The Ethicurean Cookbook

  Recipes, Foods and Spirituous

  Liquors, from our Bounteous

  Walled Garden in the Several

  Seasons of the Year

  [The Mendips, Somerset]

    Winter:  Beetroot Carpaccio

    with honeyed walnuts, mizuna,

    purslane, land cress, and flaky

    sea salt

Ebury Press

Random House, 2013©

i   Martin Conte

ii  Brenan at Yegen

Escape from the helix

               My first letters about finding and mov-
               ing into my house were vivid, but then
               as I settled down to my hermit's exis-
               tence they became more tedious and pro-
               lix.. I only wrote well when something
               was happening that interested me.. I 
               became an articulate letter writer many
               years before I could compose a tolerable
               paragraph - I imagine because I found it
               easier to communicate what I felt to a
               person I wished to amuse and please than
               to compose something of an impersonal sort
               for a faceless public.

I was always divided in my loyalty
to 'Bloomsbury', considered as a
group. There could be no doubt a-
bout the high level of their in-
telligence, while their cult of
good conversation made them very
stimulating people to know. But I
thought that Maynard Keynes' de-scription of them as water spiders swimming gracefully on the surface of the stream contained a good deal of truth.. This attitude was illustrated for me by their opin-ion of Joyce's Ulysses.. They lived by good taste and I saw with regret that I was being carried along the same road and being obliged to live by it too.

                          

  However anything I write
  on Hemingway must be mere
  speculation. I did not see
  him often enough to speak
  of him with any conviction.
  I will only add, he exuded
  vitality. One did not have
  to read his books to feel
  his greatness as a man.

Gerald Brenan
Personal Record
  1920 - 1972
Alfred A. Knopf, 1975©

Xavier Serrano

Now, now, Class, we mustn't make fun

     












There are lights
in which none of
us is at our best.

   Stuart Hampshire observed that S.I.S.

   values information in proportion to

   its secrecy, not to its accuracy. They

   would attach more value, he said, to a

   scrap of third-rate and tendentious mis-

   information smuggled out of Sofia in the

   fly-buttons of a vagabond Rumanian pimp

   than to any intelligence deduced from a

   prudent reading of the foreign press.

   And of course he's quite right.

Hugh Trevor-Roper

Major, S.I.S.

Regius Professor, Oxford

Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge

Lord Dacre of Glanton

The Wartime Journals

April, 1943

op. cit.

What is your book of the year?

For me, it would have to
be an improbably good book,
to have anything to do with
a year just ending, a fash-
ion just emerging, a hagio-
graphy just congealing. A
just book is suspect, even
unto the next extinction.

I find the book of the year
a carrying forward, not by
principle but by genetics.
I didn't invent the criter-
ion, it came up from the
pages - and yes, they are
pages, not pixels, to be
sat beside and with, struck
by knowing it will not be
lost.

What is your book like this?

Some chapters ago, this week

  Straying from customary context,
  and leaping whole hedgerows of
  principled discernment in cock-
  tails, one could not miss that
  Amanda Hesser had included in
  her updated Claiborne the news-
  paper's recital of ingredients
  for the Vesper apéritif, named
  for the enchantress of Casino
  Royale, who introduces herself
  in the dining car of the VSOE
  wagon-lit with the demure con-
  fession, I'm the money. Never,
  since Eva Marie Saint correct-
  ed Cary Grant's introduction
  in North by Northwest, had any
  repast of the rails aroused 
  such a staggered, fiery thirst, 
  even among the plenteously in-
  fused patrons of an academic
  sanctuary.



I witnessed the screening 
of this film in the col-
lege down the road, in the
company of a paid-up sub-
scriber to its tuition, 4 
years after the newspaper 
published a cocktail Bond
ordered in Montenegro. Now,
I'm in no position to say,
that the gasp which swept
through the cineplex as 
Vesper identified herself, 
was for Her Majesty's Trea-
sury; readers will recog-
nize, rather, the bibulous 
responses we resort to, in 
deference to climate change,
indeed the lengths to which
we'll go, to keep its secret.

3 oz vodka

1 oz gin

1/4 oz Lillet

twist of lemon

Amanda Hesser

  editor

The Essential New York

  Times Cookbook

  Classic Recipes for a

  New Century

    The Vesper

William L. Hamilton

Shaken and Stirred

  East Meets West

December 15, 2007

The New York Times, 2010©

Convulsive encores

There were moments, as I was wind-
ing up a Wodehouse this weekend, 
when I turned to Thorny in alarm
at my convulsions, to warn I might
not make it through the rapids of
hilarious currents that held me.

Our well-educated dread of the
ill-named holiday season has been
burnished this week by convulsion
left and right, as one of the or-
naments of American letters endured
a distasteful mutiny, a benchmark
blog announced it was fed up with
its mission, Republicans sallied
forth with tropical-tie repugnancy,
and rapists were heartened by lazy
reporting on their game. I didn't
list the justice system's exposure
on Staten Island because our soci-
ety's propagation of its crimes was
brilliantly reflected in a memoir by
Tom Ricks at The New Yorker. This
all comes in when the very question
of what a book is, and what it is
for, is plaguing our publications -
and this one - with annual demands
to be answered. It's not a test to
be shirked, and it won't be, here.
Yet there's a book we keep on writ-
ing that we still don't read.

              Inside the bunker, one of the grunts

              has been saying hideous things in his

              sleep, laughing a bad laugh and then

              going more silent than even deep sleep

              permits before starting it up again,

              and it is more terrible in there than

              any place I can even imagine. I got up

              then and went outside, any place at all

              was better than this, and stood in the 

              dark smoking a cigarette, watching the

              hills for a sign and hoping none would

              come because, shit, what could be re-

              vealed except more fear?

Salvador Dali
Portrait ..
1963
St Petersburg


Michael Herr
Dispatches
  Khe Sanh 
  iv
Alfred A. Knopf, 1977©


P.G. Wodehouse
Heavy Weather
1933
op. cit.