PNR 291 – editorial (Sept-October 2026) One aspect of contemporary academic plagiarism by professors, lecturers and students is the characterlessness of the material plagiarised – the more anonymous, or style-less, the ‘original’ which is being adapted, the less detectable the plagiarism is likely to be. Plagiarists borrow from a text where small adjustments might deceive plagiarism […]
Proving that he is not a ‘posthumous poet’, as (self) described in PNR, Michael Schmidt’s pamphlet, Here They Are has ben published by SmithDoorstop. This remarkable new collection is his shortest and most brilliantly complete and compelling. It bears out Rachel Mann’s comment in a review about the ‘precise and disconcerting magic’ of his language. As […]
PNR 290 – editorial (July-August 2026) In October 1965 Elizabeth Jennings (the centenary of whose birth we mark this year) saved an afternoon for me. A friend had given me her latest Macmillan book. I wanted her to sign it. She was a tenant in a large first floor bedroom, if I remember, at the front of a North Oxford late-Victorian […]
PNR 289 – editorial (May-June 2026) How concerned should we be? The Bookseller on 20 April was plenty concerned. ‘Nearly a third of children cannot use books when they start school, with some even trying to swipe and zoom on the pages, a survey from Kindred Squared has shown. The research was part of their school readiness […]
PNR 288 – editorial (March-April 2026) Peter Jones is an unacknowledged presence in many poetry-lovers’ libraries. He edited the Penguin (Modern Classic since 2001) Imagist Poetry, first published in 1972 and now in its thirteenth or fourteenth edition. It also exists in Chinese translation. On 7 November 2025 Peter died in a nursing home. He was ninety-six years old. […]
PNR 287 – editorial (January-February 2026) A friend challenged me: ‘Tell ChatGPT to write a poem in your style.’ I am so posthumous as a poet that I doubted ChatGPT had ingested and digested my gristles. But I asked it and, sure enough, in seconds it regurgitated – or gurgitated – a poem clearly using devices I favour, with my repetitions, my […]
PNR 286 – editorial (November-December 2025) In Index on Censorship (2, 1996) Nadine Gordimer quotes Walter Benjamin: ‘One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later.’ This was Tony Harrison’s mature achievement. At his radical best, when he was writing some of the […]
PNR 285 – editorial (September-October 2025) Why was I so affected by the story of the beetle infestation of the millennium-old Hungarian Pannonhalma Archabbey? It has something to do with the way in which the sudden disturbance in the permanency of a library affects the stability of the librarian and the readers themselves. When at the start […]
PNR 284, Editorial (July-August 2025) One subscriber to PN Review, John Looker, enjoyed Colin Bramwell’s introductory contribution to PNR 283 in Scots. With a parodic Home Counties voice, he said, ‘I should be grateful if you would kindly inform Mr Bramwell that I found his essay jolly interesting. Frightfully witty too. I had to read it slowly and, […]
PNR 283, May-June 2025 The PN Review 281 editorial occasioned many responses. Its themes have informed PN Review from early on – how writers exist between as well as within languages and dialects. The activity of translation from one language to another, from a given to an acquired dialect, can appear analogous to the initial process of generating experience […]
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