Libraries and archives
An Archive Is An Empty Theatre: Elizabeth Hardwick
‘The writing of biography, Hardwick knew, is subject to the same technical questions that govern fiction but with an added ethical dilemma. Namely, that the writer must choose from one of many possible narratives, with the knowledge that this act of selection will fundamentally influence the representation at hand. We encounter the same dilemma in the archive: how to construct, from a lifetime of papers, a singular portrait of the author? It is impossible to include everything.”
Libraries under threat
The destruction of the libraries of the English speaking world has been underway for a quarter of a century. It dates from the Reagan-Thatcher regime of the 1980s, the introduction of economic rationalism and the payback for the student activism of the 1960s and 1970s.