Philip Spires commonplace book

I have kept a commonplace book for many years. It's a place where scraps of impressions are filed for future reflection. It's not a diary, it's just a mental scrapbook, concentrating on book reviews, concert reviews, visual arts and some occasional pieces on travel. It is also a place where I occasionally reflect on what I write. Details of my books can be found at http://www.philipspires.co.uk

Showing posts with label france. Show all posts

Friday, March 4, 2022

The Fugitive by Marcel Proust

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Reaching the end of The Fugitive, volume six of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche de temps perdu , I begin to realise – not quite at last – h...

Thursday, February 10, 2022

The Captive – aka The Prisoner by Marcel Proust

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The musings of an adolescent male, perhaps not a completely formed adult human being, if such a state is ever achieved by anyone privileged ...

Friday, January 21, 2022

The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust

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In a turn of uncharacteristic succinctness, Gioachino Rossini, himself the composer of long-winded and often empty vocal gymnastics undert...

Friday, February 19, 2021

Swann’s Way – In Search of Lost Time Volume 1 Marcel Proust

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Imagine a collage, an assemblage of the entire output of august artists, especially those of fin-de-siecle France, those one-time upstarts a...

Friday, January 10, 2014

Lawrence Durrell's Quincunx, The Avignon Quintet

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In Egypt, in Alexandria to be precise, if precision be our goal, Lawrence Durrell once attempted to fuse fiction into a relativistic univers...

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About Me

philipspires: I was born in Wakefield and was brought up in Sharslton, a mining Village. I went to London University and then became a maths teacher, working initially as a volunteer teacher in Kenya. I spent sixteen years in London, in Balham and Islington. In 1992, I left Britain for Brunei and then Zayed University in Abu Dhabi. I currently live in La Nucia, near Benidorm in Spain. I am interested in the relationship between nature and nurture, birthright and experience. Themes of culture and identity and their relation to economic and social roles underpin my writing. What we are born into relates to what we become, but we are rarely in control. What others do, our interests and intellects and the way we choose to earn a living, all of these shape us into what we become. It may be that culture is the sum of all assumptions that others make on our behalf, whereas identity represents our reactions to them. I did a PhD on the effects of education in economic development in the Philippines. I was President of Alfas del Pi Music Society for twelve years.

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