Status Updates From Uit het raam

Barnes on Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier being called 'the finest French novel in the English language':

'If readers can be put off by titles (I resisted The Catcher in the Rye for many years, imagining it to be a prairie baseball novel) so they can by hyping tags. What's the point of writing a French novel in English? you might roughly ask.'

'In 'England, Your England' he denounces the left-wing English intelligentsia for being 'generally negative' and 'querulous': adjectives which from this distance seem to fit Orwell pretty aptly. Given that he died at the age of forty-six, it's scary to imagine the crustiness that might have set in had he reached pensionable age.'

'Getting its history wrong', wrote Ernest Renan, 'is part of being a nation.' Pointedly, he said, 'being' not 'becoming': the self-delusion is a constant requirement, not just part of a state's initial creation myth. Similarly, getting its iconic figures wrong - and rebranding them at intervals - is part of being a nation. The Orwell whom the English have sanctified is a descendant of...Dr Johnson.

'So Amours de Voyage – this great long poem which is also a great short novella – is in the end about failure, about not seizing the day, about misreading and overanalysing, about cowardice. But cowardice is generally more interesting to the writer than courage, as failure is more exciting than success...'