MODERN BOOKMAN
LONELY PLEASURES, by Daniel Géorge; Jonathan Cape, English price 15/-. "THESE Lonely Pleasures-‘"personal, bibliographical, critical, historical, biographical, -‘quotational" — are the pleasures of reading: but of uncommon reading. Daniel George is a bookman by temperament, one of the long line that began with Sir Thomas Browne, and continued through Charles Lamb and some notable Victorians to Logan Pearsall Smith. But he is a modern bookman, who knows he must be brief and pithy: that the literary essay nowadays has shrun!: into the third leader. that if this sort of thing is to get a hearing at all itymust be witty, concentrated, and a la mode, It is a sad fate: once he would have been for whole volumes in| folio, now he must gather up the snip- | pets, and can only spread himself in his | index. Yet this book-which it would be unfair to describe as a collection of short articles and reviews-will give great pleasure to many, including the professional scholars who are so often pilloried in it. It is gay, malicious, sufficiently prejudiced to be interesting; and because of its form, it can be picked up and opened anywhere: few readers will be content with a single excerpt. It is the ideal bedside book for the literary minded; no one who dips into it can fail to be entertained, or to learn something about authors and sources that he
did not know before.
J.
B.
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Bibliographic details
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 800, 19 November 1954, Page 13
Word count
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238MODERN BOOKMAN New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 800, 19 November 1954, Page 13
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