Plain English: January 2011 Archives

 

The exhibition called "Modern British Sculpture" that opened at the Royal Academy today (until 7 April) is a fraud.

         It's one of those shows intended to illustrate a theory or make an argument. Its publicity claims: "the exhibition takes a fresh approach, replacing the traditional survey with a provocative set of juxtapositions that challenge the viewer to make new connections and break the mould of old conceptions [my emphasis]." The trouble is that the "new connections" are so desperately old hat.

There have been many obituaries of John Gross, who died on 10 January. He was the critics' critic, witty, erudite, and polymathic, a graceful writer and a lightning-quick thinker. His series of Oxford anthologies, his books on Shylock, Joyce and Kipling and his 2001 memoir about growing up in the Jewish East End of London, A Double Thread, will all last; and one of his books, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: English Literary Life since 1800 (1969), is a classic.