Ian Jack - Böcker

An aphorism: you are what you eat.A second aphorism: the discovery of a new dish does more for the happiness of mankind than the discovery of a star.A third aphorism: dessert without cheese is like a pretty woman with only one eye.The French philosopher-gourmet Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote all three almost two centuries ago. Like most aphorisms they have the cracked ring of the nearly true. Brillat-Savarin was on surer ground - ground as hard as ungrated Parmesan - when he wrote:The world is nothing without life, and all that lives takes nourishment.So: you are what you eat, and if you don't eat, you aren't.This issue of Granta examines the vital stuff. Food as indulgence, certainly (gastro-pornography - blinis with caviar, roast puffin), but also food as a taboo, a cruelty, a repulsion, a desperate need, a failed sex aid, and a way of earning your living.

Margaret Smith was the winner of the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for her work on the Clarendon Edition of the Brontës work

This book is intended for students of English literature at `A' level and above; general readers interested in a complete history of literature from Middle English to the earlier twentieth century.

Margaret Smith, winner of the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for her work on the Brontës

This volume contains six of the eight Bells and Pomegranates, modestly-priced pamphlets published by Edward Moxon in a bid to help Browning recover from the ridicule which greeted the first appearance of Sordello. It includes Pippa Passes, four other dramatic works, and Dramatic Lyrics, the first of the great collections of short poems with which Browning established his reputation. In addition, a version of a poem on the Pied Piper by Browning's father is here printed for the first time. All significant textual variants are recorded, and each of the Bells is accompanied by an introduction and by full annotation. New information throws further light on this most important period in Browning's poetic career.

`Browning really comes back to life in the marvellous third volume of the new Oxford Browning', wrote John Bayley, choosing it as one of his Books of the Year for 1988. While Volume III included six of the eight Bells and Pomegranates pamphlets, the present volume completes the series and includes the most remarkable of all, Dramatic Romances and Lyrics. Here we find `Pictor Ignotus', `The Lost Leader', `The Bishop orders his Tomb', `The Laboratory', `The Boy and the Angel', and the first part of `Saul'. Also included are Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day and the essay on Shelley.As the Times Literary Supplement reviewer of the earlier volumes commented, `readers of a poet like this need all the help they can get; and Jack and Smith have provided it in abundance.' Each poem is fully annotated, and accompanied by a detailed introduction which provides information on the chronology of composition and on Browning's sources.

This is the first full scholarly edition of Browning's greatest and perhaps best-known collection of short poems, Men and Women. A comprehensive introduction shows how new research by Ian Jack an Robert Inglesfield has unearthed material which throws fresh light on the composition and dates of such famous pieces as 'Fra Lippo Lippi', 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came', and 'One Word More: To E.B.B.'.This edition uses a critical text based on that of Browning's final collection, and has detailed introductions to the individual poems. It is the fifth volume in the highly praised Political Works of Robert Browning.

'Love is nothing without feeling. And feeling is still less without love.'Celebrated in its own day as the progenitor of 'a school of sentimental writers', A Sentimental Journey (1768) has outlasted its many imitators because of the humour and mischievous eroticism that inform Mr Yorick's travels. Setting out to journey to France and Italy he gets little further than Lyons but finds much to appreciate, in contrast to contemporary travel writers whom Sterne satirizes in the figures of Smelfungus and Mundungus. A master of ambiguity and double entendre, Sterne is nevertheless as concerned as his peers with exploring the nature of virtue; unlike other writers of sentimental fiction Sterne insists on the inseparability of desire and feeling.This new edition includes a selection from The Sermons of Mr Yorick, which shed light on the concerns of the Journey, The Journal to Eliza, which records Sterne's feelings as he languishes for the company of Eliza Draper, and A Political Romance, the satire on a local ecclesiastical squabble that was the catalyst for Sterne's literary career. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

How far, and in what respects, is a poet's work influenced by the kind of audience for which he writes? The question is crucial to our understanding of how great poems came to be written, yet it has rarely been addressed in a systematic study. In this fascinating and illuminating book Ian Jack has chosen six major poets - Dryden, Pope, Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, and Yeats - and has traced the career of each to discover the nature and the extent of their readers' influence on their poetry. He shows that poets living in different periods and different cultural milieux addressed themselves to very differently constituted audiences (though all tended to have a close circle of highly sensitive friends on whom they could first test their work in private), and indicates how their need to adapt to the prevailing conditions shaped the nature of their poetry.

Over the past two decades India has produced a dazzling variety of new writing in English. 'India Calling' showcases some of this talent, Amit Chaudhuri and Arundhati Roy, alongside contributions from long celebrated writers such as R.K. Narayan, V.S. Naipaul, Nirad Chaudhuri and Ved Mehta.

This collection of essays features the theme of what people wanted as children. The contributing writers include: Doris Lessing, Paul Auster, Brian MacKinnon and Nell Stroud. There are also pieces by George Steiner, J.M. Coetzee, Joyce Carol Oates, John Biguenet and Peter Walker.

John Litchfield on how the French election exposed a national identity crisis.

We came from the sea, and we would be nothing without it. Without the sea, no clouds, no rain, no rivers, no life. Seven-tenths of the world's surface is sea. We play at its edges, we put down nets and feed from it, we send cargo across its ruffling surface. And yet it remains the wildest, strangest and least-known part of the planet: a puzzle. Science knows more about the surface of the moon than it does about the ocean floor (somewhere between ten million and a hundred million unclassified species live there; science has still to find out). We do not quite know how the sea works. Is it rising? Warming? How much pollution can it take? How many of its island states will disappear?The sea is the natural arena for adventure, mystery and catastrophe (the Odyssey, Moby-Dick, the Titanic, El Niño). But air has replaced water as the transporting element of the twentieth century, and the sea has been retreating in the imaginations of the West.For too long we have turned out backs to it.

In this edition of the Granta magazine, Richard Lloyd Parry reports on the savage civil war taking place in Indonesia and Nicholas Shakespeare writes on Martha Gelhorn and why she hated her husband, Ernest Hemingway.

THE SCENE OF THE CRIME: Genocide is a word that has haunted this century, but its definition is contentious and our memory of it selective. A photographic essay by Simon Norfolk introduced by Michael Ignatieff.BEASTS: what they make of us, and how they shape us. Including Paul Auster living a dog's life; Hilary Mantel on a mongrel breed; Sam Toperoff as a tarantula ('Why would we poison anything we weren't going to eat?')NEW FICTION: from John Barth, T.C. Boyle, Jackie Kay, and Martin Amis ('Love without words. A caveman could do it. And it sounded like something that Picasso or Beckett might have pulled off. But Sir Rodney Peel?')MY FROZEN FATHER: a memory of South Africa by Deborah LevyPUNISHMENT: witnessed in the USA and in Pakistan by Joyce Carol Oates and Anwar Iqbal ('Although I had been writing against public flogging ever since it began, I wanted to watch it.')

This issue on Russia explores how an old country is finding new ways to think and write. As well as fiction by Russian writers, there is a report on a visit to the once unvisitable Siberia, interviews with the survivors of Stalin's gulag, and a discussion of the place of vodka in Russian culture.

In 1996 Benjamin Wilkomirski published his powerful account of a childhood spent in Hitler's death-camps. But was it true? Is the truth that he was a Swiss boy with an over-developed imagination, making his book a shocking fraud? In a long investigation Elena Lappin has examined the evidence against him.

This issue reflects a variety of the extreme individual experience provided by the 20th century. James Hamilton-Paterson recounts his rape by five men in the Libyan desert; Joy Williams decides that her dog should die; Marlon Brando reveals the stupidities of celebrity to Studs Terkel; Andrew Brown describes the death of God in the Church of England; Francis Spufford stands among the ice at Captain Scott's grave to pay his respects to a vanished idea of heroism; and Ian Jack, travelling through the Titanic phenomenon, finds the last resting place of Leonardo DiCaprio. Also included is writing from J.M. Coetzee, Edward Said and Edmund White.

In 1966, the South African premier, Hendrik Verwoerd was stabbed to death in the South African parliament. Who was the killer and what was his motives? A political enemy of the system? A madman?

The year 2000 is Australia's year, including the Sydney Olympics in September, and the 100th anniversary of its nationhood three months later. This issue of "Granta" celebrates Australian writing and examines a country which is forging a strong new identity. The contributors include Peter Carey, Thomas Keneally, Les Murray, Tim Winton, Frank Moorhouse, Howard Jacobson, Robyn Davidson, Murray Bail, Paul Toohey, Georgia Blain and Peter Conrad. There are picture essays by Polly Borland and David Moore, and an Australian novella by English writer Ben Rice.

A collection of essays, both fiction and non-fiction, examining psychiatry from the patient's couch and the psychiatrist's chair.

New fiction from Matt Condon. Panos Karnezis, and Olga Tokarczuk with a story on the hiden lives of hotel rooms, the first translation of Poland's most acclaimed young novelists.