Читать книгу The Origins of English Nonsense - Noel Malcolm - Страница 4

PRAISE

From the reviews of The Origins of English Nonsense:

‘In this most original study, Noel Malcolm has discovered the first stirrings of English nonsense … it is a work of some wit, and itself tends towards parody of more solemn studies. Malcolm’s book has all the elaborate paraphernalia of scholarship, complete with learned footnotes and a lengthy bibliography designed to promote the cause of nonsense. This book is as rare, then as hedgehog’s feathers or baskets of water.’

PETER ACKROYD, The Times

‘Brilliant scholar, political journalist, an expert both on Bosnia and Thomas Hobbes, Noel Malcolm is a sort of Renaissance man himself: far-ranging in the scope of his learning, rational, elitist, impervious to the claims of political correctness or trendy jargon. His prose has a satirical edge which is a continual intellectual challenge, if not always warmly sympathetic; his quirky facts are extraordinary; and he has produced an elegant, enjoyable book which is a real contribution to literary history.’

JACKIE WULLSCHLAGER, Financial Times

‘Never happier than when he is writing against the grain of received opinion, Noel Malcolm takes full delight in making a coterie cult of poems which more solemn scholars have dismissed as irrelevant doodlings. Malcolm’s immensely erudite introduction, which explains the vogue for nonsense poetry at the turn of the seventeenth-century and traces its origins in Classical and European literature, measures its tone perfectly, managing to sound as serious and at the same time as frivolous as much of the best verse in the anthology … Malcolm’s book is a delight, in which he recovers something genuinely rich and strange about our poetic ancestors. If the best history compels our attention by making the past not more but less familiar, The Origins of English Nonsense succeeds.’

MARK ARCHER, Spectator