THE subtitle of Julian Barnes's new collection is somewhat misleading: aside from a beautifully written preface, the essays gathered here are not about France.
During this period Ivanov published articles, the philosophical and aesthetic essays gathered in the book Borozdy i mezhi (1916; "Furrows and Boundaries"), and the historico-philosophical and political pieces in Rodnoye i vselenskoye (1917; "Native and Universal").
The 24 essays gathered here came about when distinguished writers were given what sounds like a most appealing brief: choose a museum that has played a part in your life, go back and write about it.
He loved playing the fool, describing his aesthetic theories, the authentic fruit of his genius, in a semiliterate patois familiar to anyone who has read his letters or scanned the titles of his essays (gathered, for example, in a volume called "Guide to Kulchur").
This background no doubt contributed to Alex's dislike of conventional boundaries and eventually to the impassioned opposition to binary thinking ("us and them; black and white; good and evil; civilisation and barbarism") expressed in the essays gathered in On Art and War and Terror, and On Good and Evil and the Grey Zone.
Such was the audacity, verbal brilliance and troubled passion of Tynan, the writer and man, now bracingly revealed in Profiles, a collection of 50 of his extraordinary essays gathered by his widow, Kathleen Tynan, and Ernie Eban.
In the decade since, she has done her share of growing up in public, producing a self-conscious homage to E.M. Forster, "On Beauty" (which I admired but also found oddly bloodless) and producing a series of very smart critical essays, gathered in the 2009 collection "Changing My Mind," that originally appeared in publications such as the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.
Her three previous essay collections gathered brilliant commentary on welfare, abortion, surrogate motherhood, Iraq, gay marriage and health care, mostly from the pages of The Nation.
These essays were gathered and edited by Eli Hager.
For example, in his 1911 12 series of essays I gather the limbs of Osiris, Pound writes of Daniel's line "pensar de lieis m'es repaus" ("it rests me to think of her") (from the canzone En breu brizara'l temps braus): "You cannot get statement simpler than that, or clearer, or less rhetorical".
