Stephen Medcalf (1937-2006) was an essayist, in the best
traditional sense of that calling: a writer not of books but of
substantial and justly celebrated essays, widely read in the Times
Literary Supplement and elsewhere. Medcalf's abiding question to
the world was the Psalmist's: 'What is man that thou art mindful of
him?' His was a Blakean sense of Englishness, far from the
chocolate-box painting or the television adaptation, and for him
the strongest writers were those keenly aware of their roots in the
classical, Anglo-Saxon or Celtic past. By gathering together
Medcalf's most important work, this volume shows the coherence of
his thinking, and of the elusive, complicated literary heritage he
celebrated, one which acknowledges the Greco-Roman strain, the
Christian strain, the down-to-earth humour and the sly irony.
Thirteen substantial essays cover Virgil, the Bible, the English
translation of Alfred, Piers Plowman, the 'half-alien culture' of
the high Middle Ages, Chaucer's contemporary Thomas Usk,
Shakespeare's images of resurrection, Horace and Kipling
juxtaposed, G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot's use of Ovid, P. G.
Wodehouse, William Golding, John Betjeman, Geoffrey Hill and other
writers. The book concludes with perhaps Medcalf's most personal
article of all: his account of finding a baby in a phone box on a
cold winter's night, which first appeared in the Guardian Christmas
Supplement in 2002.
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