This rite of dotage called Late Style is peculiar to artists of one sort or another. Airline pilots and hepatologists are, thankfully, among the undeservedly excluded. This is an almost exclusively aesthetic matter. What it signifies is, however, moot. As a subject for disputatious inquiry it has been posthumously divvied up between the shades of Theodor Adorno and Edward Said and their packs of enthusiastic yes-persons who may consider that Late Style is as involuntary and inevitable as a gr...| UnHerd
It is Muriel Spark’s universe and I just live in it. Certainly, her droll eye and irrepressible spirits have been a comfort to me these past few years, as the culture around me seemed to collapse into obsessive interiority and neurotic display. Just like their originator, many of Spark’s chatty, noticing characters have no interest in navel-gazing and little self-doubt. To spend time with them is relaxing and amusing, no matter what chicanery they witness or have embarked upon themselves....| UnHerd