John Gross

The Oxford Book of Essays (Oxford Books of Prose)

Gavin

I've been reading this slowly for 6 months; it is a belter. Gross has given me tender feelings for a hundred dead people, and what is one to do with those, except what I'm doing right now?

Great essays share something. These essayists wouldn't all agree on anything, I'm sure. But there's something about their voices: personal, rational, intimate, concise, forceful. The essay is in the process of being superceded by the article and the blogpost, but we shouldn't judge those two forms by the dross we are all seeing from day to day; surely most essays were also petty and inelegant. 

Just one example: I bear quite a lot of ill-will toward Churchill; but his entry here is just incredibly beautiful; a hallucinatory conversation with his dead father, with junior struggling to bridge the violent gap the last two generations made in culture and history. I would not have believed him so self-aware: 


  
    
  


  
    
  


I also find myself nodding in agreement with the likes of Cardinal Newman and Makepeace Thackaray. I will again, too.

I went and got Gross' Oxford collection of aphorisms, ready for the slow treatment.

The Oxford Book of Essays (Oxford Books of Prose)

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