Critics for breakfast by the Cam

“In an age of the TV Book Club, tweeting, blogging and citizen journalism, when anyone can broadcast an opinion, what part do our most vibrant and respected literary journals play?”

That is the question facing us on Sunday morning at the Cambridge Wordfest when, as the invitation continues:

“The editors of the London Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, Granta and Cambridge Review will discuss the importance and future of literary journalism and critical writing.

This is a good subject.

And since it will be “chaired by Mary Beard, professor in Classics at Cambridge University”, blogger on this site and famed for her intolerance of self-serving blather, we ought to be forced to give some good answers or, the venue being Cambridge, be given some.

At a similar event I did at Princeton last year, many of the best answers came from the audience.

Someone has just asked me whether, London literary society being such a ‘closed elite etc etc’, I wasn’t tired of eating and drinking with my colleagues at the LRB and Granta. I could honestly reply that we have never sat down together before to discuss this or anything else.

On Saturday lunch-time I’m talking to Philip Pullman about his new book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. That one is sold out but there are tickets left, I’m told, for our Sunday breakfast. If you’re close to Cambridge this weekend, come and join us.   

Comments

[Candadai Tirumalai]

Regarding the title of Philip Pullman's book, which some will undoubtedly find blasphemous: there is I think much to be learned by thinking of the various possible relationships between Jesus and Christ in his own mind and in history.