Robert McCrum
Departing Sunday Observer Books Editor Recalls the Past 10 Years of Literary History
Robert McCrum, literary editor of the UK Sunday paper The Observer, stepped down this month after a decade on the job. Yesterday he deployed a parting shot both wistful and sober-minded. "When I joined The Observer in 1996, the world of books was in limbo between hot metal and cool word processing, " he writes, with a nostalgia that comes off not a little anachronistic, considering we're talking about 1996 here and not 1958. "Everything smelled of the lamp. It was a world of ink and paper; of cigarettes, coffee and strong drink. Our distinguished critic George Steiner used to submit his copy in annotated typescript."
Wodehouse and Beckett: Their Secret Kinship Revealed
Wodehouse: A Life, by Robert McCrum. W.W. Norton and Company, 530 pages, $27.95.
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