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 literary. Show all posts

Saturday, June 8, 2024

73 poems by e e cummings

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poetry:to me is about passing images that sometimes stick but often pass by only to return un:announced when le ast expected ...

Thursday, December 2, 2021

Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag

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Against Interpretation by Susan Sontag was first published in 1961. It is hard in 2020, to accept that this was almost 60 years ago, espec...

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Monsieur or The Prince of Darkness by Lawrence Durrell

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Some decades ago I read Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet and all his travel books. The term addict could easily have been an under-stat...

Thursday, June 25, 2009

The Master by Colm Toibin

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In The Master, Colm Toibin offers the reader a style and content quite different from his other novels. In a sense, the book is an act of ho...

Sunday, May 25, 2008

The Door by Magda Szabo

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The Door by Magda Szabo is a detailed, intimate account of a relationship between two women. Paradoxically, it was the distance between them...

Saturday, October 13, 2007

A review of The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk

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I have visited Turkey, but not Istanbul. It’s one of those iconic places that keeps cropping up in travel plans, but then gets overlooked, p...

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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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