The English Miscellany

For some people, I suspect, libraries have become an act of faith, or a kind of heritage; they hang on to libraries like cathedrals long after their belief in the deity has past away. No doubt the great libraries will survive. Those are the ones with vast national collections, or those with a special antiquity, or a majestic architecture. The fate of the rundown relics of suburbia is less clear; not matter how much we celebrate the power of the little library it appears that its extinction is as likely as the video-hire shop, or even the local bookshop, with its greeting cards, its quaint plantpots, and its local authors. Yet some of us still delight in tea-leaves, coffee-beans, and the safe solidity of printed books, long after the the victory of the instant download has streamlined the past, the present, and the future, in a dizzying sea of sameness. Sometimes there is something radical in remembering the past; it need not collapese into a conservative tear-torn nostalgia. Ga...

In A Manual of the Art of Prose Composition: For the Use of Colleges and Schools (1867), John Mitchell Bonnell explained the value of Extemporaneous Composition;   Debating by the Class; and proposed a list of topics for debate. This is an extract from his book. The following list presents a few of the questions that afford good fields for debate. Does wealth exert more influence than intelligence? Should a criminal be capitally condemned on circumstantial evidence? Are banks more beneficial than injurious? Ought military schools to be encouraged? Should colleges be endowed? Did the French revolution advance the cause of liberty in Europe? Is there any real danger of the over-population of the globe? Is country life more favourable to the cultivation of virtue than life in a city? Is history a more useful study than biography? Is ambition more destructive of personal happiness than avarice? Is it the duty of good ...

Because there are now millions of free blogs we have the opportunity to dip into lots of different kinds of writing and to sample quite different approaches to recurring topics or themes. Doing this kind of reading randomly can have wonderful results. It's called serendipity which involves surprise discoveries and unexpected connections. Serendipity is, of course, an eighteenth century word (1754). While we may consider that the period of the Enlightenment was obsessed with reason, system, order and process, the variety of different kinds of topical, fictional and journalistic writing offered many opportunities for fluid expression by creative people and mercurial personalities. Serendipity is also a useful strategy for broadening your interests and for avoiding the so-called writer's block. I believe that all great writers are also intelligent critical readers. I despair when I hear people saying that they want to write, but then proceed to say that they are not...