I've been serially unfaithful to this blog over the last few weeks: it's the charm of novelty, I regret to say. The thing with Twitter has been cheap and easy and, in my defence, everybody's doing it... But closer to the Things We Do for Love has been my developing commitment to The Place for Lost Books, the Faber Finds blog. It's certainly more than a one-time thing as far as I'm concerned. That's why I've posted lately on subjects as varied as Tolstoy's eminence, Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood', the eerie appeal of J.Sheridan Le Fanu, and F.R. Leavis's place amid the intellectual feuds of Cambridge English. I consider all this to be meaningful labour, moreover it's an outright pleasure to have a remit to write about such subjects, with the Faber Finds list offering all the riches it does. And I could affirm all of this by appending a picture of George Eliot, say, to this post - bearing in mind that Eliot is one of the few English novelists who might be compared to Tolstoy, and that Leavis wrote with particular distinction on Middlemarch. But instead, I'm going with this pic (above) of the recently deceased and sadly missed Ingrid Pitt, one of whose finest hours came in an otherwise disreputable Hammer Films version of Le Fanu's 'Carmilla', of which more in the Le Fanu post above. I'm all for the high road, you understand, but sometimes the low one also gets you there, or thereabouts...
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