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It was, I feel certain, the first time that an article in the Lancashire Evening Telegraph ever triggered a national debate. In the article, written in October, its author, Jack Straw, the leader of the House of Commons and a former foreign secretary, disclosed that he asked any visitor who came to his office wearing a full Muslim veil to uncover her face when she spoke to him. Naturally, he only made this request if a female member of his staff was present. He’s a gentleman, you know. As national debates go, it was, at least on one side, very [...]
Lifting the Veil?
December 11, 2006
I was waiting to hear what the English poet Christopher Logue had done to the Iliad, and I was worried. The omens, threatening an evening of eat-your-greens earnestness, would have troubled the most phlegmatic of soothsayers. As for the theater in which I found myself, it was more depressing than Ford’s after Booth. A long way off Broadway in all but the most geographical sense, it was a hard-seat hall a few minutes’ walk from those now-vanished towers. The only thing emptier than the bleak, Beckett-bare stage was an auditorium begging for tumbleweed. We had been told that the entire [...]
Logue’s Odyssey
December 1, 2006
Christopher Logue's the Iliad; published originally in The New Criterion