On paper, a joke is a pale and inadequate one-dimensional version of itself. In fact, a joke scarcely exists until someone has told it and someone else has laughed.
The rise of lager beer, and the great names associated with it – names like Busch, Pabst, Blatz, Schlitz and Miller – is the subject of Maureen Ogle’s effervescent, occasionally frothy Ambitious Brew, a fairly standard history with a provocative thesis attached.
There is a looming danger that James Hamilton Paterson, just as he reaches retirement age, is about to become popular.
Atheist polemic hits the best-seller list; religious books not selling so well. Possible explanations: (1) atheists are more likely to be readers; (2) readers are more likely to be atheists; (3) even religious people are tired of the way religion is saturating our culture, and are perhaps frustrated with the form it is taking in the public eye; (4) there are fewer books marketed directly to atheists published, so atheist buying power is condensed accordingly; (5) anything can happen in baseball.
Peter Lorre was Dahl’s memorable “Man from the South,” a gambler who liked to wager his Cadillac against his opponents’ fingers, and Barbara Bel Geddes played the housewife who clubbed her husband to death with a frozen leg of lamb, which she then calmly roasted and served to the cops sent over to investigate.
And if the whiff of decay that permeates the town in the story has gone, MR James’ masterly description of the church still rings true today.
Gunter Grass: The London Review of Books belatedly weighs in.
The Clash stood for something. No one was clear what this was in very precise terms, but the group’s feet were planted all right and it was easy to clock the general direction, ideologically speaking, in which their noses were pointing.
The Scots, Alice Monroe’s people, are imaginative but mistrustful of imagination; passionate about literature — they applauded in Dundee — but convinced that something so worthy shouldn’t be enjoyed openly.