Part of Series
‘Food, like sex, is mostly in the head,’ John Bayley writes in the piece that gives this anthology its title. Sure enough, in the LRB’s pages, food has often been a medium for thinking about other things: history, literature, art, cultural criticism, philosophy and – in the second half of the paper’s lifetime – more political concerns, too, such as agro-industry, ecology and inequality. This changing emphasis is salutary, but these essays also remind us that food is fun, and nothing about it is ever completely new. As his 1980 piece about vegetables makes clear, E.S. Turner, a contributor born when Edward VII was king, knew that avocados were a ‘cliché’, and that it was hard work pretending to like kale. Featuring: John Bayley, Joanna Biggs, Angela Carter, John Lanchester, James Meek, Emma Rothschild, Steven Shapin, Adam Smyth, E.S. Turner, Margaret Visser, Bee Wilson and Francis Wyndham.
Author
Professor John Bayley CBE, FBA, FRSL was a British literary critic and writer. Bayley was born in Lahore, British India, and educated at Eton, where he studied under G. W. Lyttelton, who also taught Aldous Huxley, J.B.S. Haldane, George Orwell and Cyril Connolly. After leaving Eton, he went on to take a degree at New College, Oxford. From 1974 to 1992, Bayley was Warton Professor of English at Oxford. He is also a novelist and writes literary criticism for several newspapers. He edited Henry James' The Wings of the Dove and a two-volume selection of James' short stories. From 1956 until her death in 1999, he was married to the writer Dame Iris Murdoch. When she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, he wrote the book Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch, which was made into the 2001 film Iris by Richard Eyre. In this film, Bayley was portrayed in his early years by Hugh Bonneville, and in his later years by Jim Broadbent, who won an Oscar for the performance. After Murdoch's death he married Audi Villers, a family friend. He was awarded the CBE in 1999.
