The New Yorker, 2005-12-26, 2

[fiefoe]

"College Try: Baghdad to Swarthmore" / Ben McGrath
    "My favorite word, and it's unfortunate how often you hear it, it 'corruption.' Iraqis have that wonderful rolled 'r.'"

"Far From Narnia" / Laura Miller

• Pullman enjoys striking a tone of melancholy resolve.
• "Not true like chemistry or engineering, not that kind of true? There wasn't really an Adam and Eve?" Lord Asriel tells her to think of the story as an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one." Its truth might not be tangible, but you can use it to calculate "all manner of things that couldn't be imagined without it." The metaphor is not just cunning; it helps explain why Pullman, a champion of science, writes in the fantastic mode.
• But perhaps the main reason that Oxford's dons have excelled at writing for children is that, for so long, the university dictated that they live like children: sheltered, celibate, in single-sex institutions, waited upon by indulgent servants.
• an Oxford pub where Lewis and Tolkien used to meet regularly with a group of literary friends. (They called themselves the Inklings.)
• "The present-day would-be George Eliots take up their stories as if with a pair of tongs. They're embarrassed by them. If they could write novels without stories in them, they would."
  

Anthony Lane: '...the Malick manner. All the hallmarks of this formidable tone poet are on show:... the reverence for green thoughts, the hopeless lurches into action, the bizarre physical sensibility that registers every flicker of sunlight but shies away, as if for fear of bruising, from any breath of sex.'

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