IN OUTWARD APPEARANCE Professor Jack Tagg looks more like a jazz musician of the 1950s than a retired academic. So uncanny is this resemblance to some gnarled survivor from the age of be-bop that those watching his denimjacketed and peak-capped figure lumbering towards them at a literary festival often assume that the black attaché case he carries will contain the component parts of a musical instrument — a clarinet, say, or an oboe. In fact, this assumption would be mistaken: the case is far more likely to harbour a dozen or so back-numbers of Lamplighter, the quarterly literary magazine whose business Professor Tagg has conducted since the days of Mrs Thatcher’s second term.
Lamplighter (available at a very few selected newsagents in the East Midlands area, or on subscription from…
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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, June 2023