Here are scenes from contemporary life, dreams recounted, rants of displeasure, stories sourced from ballads, Scots dialect hard by quieter English prose, ghost tales, memories.
By John C. Mosher The New Yorker, March 23 , 1929P. 11 When so-called French waiters quarrel, headwaiter finds it necessart to translate his orders to be quiet into English.
Put a quiet, unassuming English civil servant at the crossroads of superpower conflict, the apex of the quest for modern life, and you have the makings of both a thriller and a comedy.
I found out her name – Harriet – and, before the week was out, I'd found out a lot more: she was 18, fairly quiet (as English was her second language) and, due to the fact that she had never had a romantic relationship, a job or seemingly gone to bed beyond 10pm, entirely unworldly.
Her poem was full of poets and editors and critics and friends and children and dogs, and its tone of intimate allusiveness evoked a society of remarkable people meeting in each other's burnished houses and talking about literature and ideas in their quiet, kind English voices.
