Finally decide what to do with some two decades of the London Review of Books. It's just too unbearable to simply pile them into yellow sacks and send them for recycling. Instead, I will go through the Contents page & fillet out whatever catches my eye right now.
As I'm going through them it's like reliving my past - certain covers set off immediate associations, articles trigger what are now lost enthusiasms. Dare I admit it but the one edition with a young Ian McEwan on the cover had a near iconic status - a kind of projected self back in the 1980s? So much for that.
On the positive side there are compensatory discoveries - Iain Sinclair's long review of Blake in '96 which coincides perfectly with current interests; articles on Iraq and Saddam which have an uncanny prescience. But I have to be honest: I am not going to write the great novel of the 80s - or the 90s - or, probably, the first decade of the 21st Century. And so all those articles on the Falklands and the Miners' strike, and Dennis Healey, and Margaret Thatcher can go - bye bye - and if I suddenly do find myself needing them, well, there are online archives or nicely bound back issues in the Bodleian. I've finally realised - it only took twenty years or more - I am not a library.
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