WRB—Mar. 25, 2026

“eccentric or obscure”

What’s any Managing Editor of the Washington Review of Books, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around.

Links:

• Adam Roberts on death by train in nineteenth-century novels:

  [The death of Lopez in Trollope’s The Prime Minister (1875-6)] resembles Dickens’ abrupt, catastrophic death: the train moving at hyperbolic speed (“a thousand miles an hour”) with banshee cacophony, Lopez’s chillingly unhurried walk into the path of the locomotive. For Tolstoy, the train is slow but implacable, a figure of inevitability—the inevitability of slow-approaching death, the crushing force of societal disapproval, of depression. For Dickens and Trollope the engine is acceleration, speed, devastating force and death an unimaginable catastrophe, an instantaneous breaking of corporeality into its bloody components.

  [The difference here is between the train as the future, specifically, or the train as inexorable force, generally. When the train appears in twentieth-century culture it no longer smacks of technological progress, and so it can symbolize such powerful forces as salvation (“let the Midnight Special shine a light on me”) or sexual prowess (the ending of North by Northwest (1959), “the train kept a-rollin’ all night long”). The only place I can think of where the train retains its association with the future is, weirdly enough, Atlas Shrugged (1957). Everybody else had already moved onto, and then left behind, the automobile for this purpose. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In The New Statesman, Jane Cooper reviews a biography of W. H. Auden (Auden, by Peter Ackroyd, June):

  To understand Auden, readers must appreciate his sense of Englishness, which was simultaneously rooted and restless. England was that sanctuary that he intermittently fled but to which he always returned in his mind’s eye. It was at once a muse and a subject to parody, the environment that determined his eccentricities, erudition and the debauchery that likely contributed to his death aged 66: even as an aging man in America, he “always carried a bottle of vodka or gin in his suitcase, for use in the event of arriving in a ‘dry’ county.” Scotland, where Auden was a young schoolmaster, also proved ripe for poetic plumbing. An “invigorating and rhythmically inventive chant,” “Night Mail”—a poem about crossing the border into Scotland—proved Auden to be “a master of all forms of poetry” and was turned into a short film with a score by Benjamin Britten, who would become a long-standing collaborator. Being mocked for his Englishness while tutoring in Helensburgh might have suited him; he liked to stand out, and while at Oxford would scandalize his peers with vulgar sexual divulgences and provocative pronouncements about life and art. Like many a university wit, “Auden’s talk tended to be dogmatic,” Ackroyd writes. “The cinema was not of the slightest interest; modern drama was impossible; the ballet should be forbidden.”

  [Shame the headline writer didn’t go for “We must love Wystan Auden or die,” but I suppose you can’t call him that in a headline.

  And from this review I learned that “Auden claimed that for more than a year of his adolescence he endeavored to read Thomas Hardy and ‘no one else.’” I wish I had actually done this, and I wish I had thought of claiming to have done so. Maybe I will anyway. When I was thirteen I read Tess of the d’Urbervilles twenty-nine times in a row, and to that reading I attribute my vast riches, good looks, winning personality, and general success in life. —Steve]

• In The New Yorker, Anthony Lane reviews a book about plagiarism (Strikingly Similar: Plagiarism and Appropriation from Chaucer to Chatbots, by Roger Kreuz, January) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Jan. 7, 2026.]:

  If that is the shape of things to come, it will be comically hard to police. Give me raiders of the lost past, any day, and forgive them their lack of footnotes. I remember listening to Bedtime Stories, Madonna’s 1994 album, and being surprised by a moony track called “Love Tried to Welcome Me,” which contains the lines “But my soul drew back, / Guilty of lust and sin.” This is an unacknowledged but unmistakable nod to George Herbert, one of the most enduring religious poets of the early seventeenth century, who wrote a magnificent poem that begins “Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, / Guilty of dust and sin.” How Herbert, who was an Anglican priest of surpassing gentleness, might have felt about being quoted, three and a half centuries later, by somebody with a Catholic name and a conical bra we shall, alas, never know. The most gratifying irony is that, in changing the mortally ashen “dust” to the cheaper and more obvious “lust,” Madonna proved only that Herbert wrote better lyrics than she did, and I can’t help wishing that she had turned to him more often for guidance both verbal and spiritual. Papa does preach.

  [The subject of whether the “plagiarized” work is better than the original, as addressed here, comes up less often than it should. (“My Sweet Lord” is a better song than “He’s So Fine,” for example.) And artists who make it worse can adapt the approach of Paddy writing to his Irish Molly-O: “Remember, it’s the pen that’s bad, / Don’t lay the blame on me!” —Steve]

[Behind the paywall are even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and Critical notes. Today’s specials:

• I finally finished The Recognitions, a book designed to appeal to me

• The best poems about baseball and football

• K. T. on a Poem by Karen Solie and unexpected images

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]