Reads (1989)

Brigid Brophy is a name that bubbles up now and then from that great tar pit known as postwar British Lit. But apart from her memorable 1966 "Introduction" to the re-issue -- and re-appreciaton -- of Elizabeth Smart's By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945), I'd read nothing of her. And then, as chance happens, I am in the "New Arrivals" section of Tanglewood Books the other day, and there she blows: a 1989 collection of Brophy essays (and rather baroque sentences) called Reads, covering some of my favourite writers (Simenon, Colette, Genet) as well as those I'd never heard of (Firbank), but am eager to read.

Brophy, it seems, has opinions on everything -- not just on writers and books, but on cities (Lisbon) and countrysides ("The Menace of Nature"). 

From the latter:

"Rustic sentimentality makes us build our suburban villas to mimic cottages, and then pebble-dash their outside walls in pious memory of the holiday we spent sitting agonized on the shingle. The lovely terraced façades of London are being undermined, as by subsidence, by our yearning, our sickly nostalgia, for a communal country childhood that never existed." (7)