As I Was Saying Yesterday: Selected Essays & Reviews

This collection offers the wise, wickedly wry extended essays that Beer wrote for The London Review of Books, the Listener, and the Times Literary Supplement during the last 25 years of her life. Borrowing literary examples from Dickens, Owen, and Shakespeare, Beer’s satire belongs to the generation including D. J. Enright and Donald Davie and covers remarkably varied subjects. A critic of contemporary literary trends and religious fervor, Beer was known by one critic as “a religious poet stripped of the blurring consolations of religion.”

Patricia Beer was a professor of English literature at Goldsmith’s College in London. Beer’s published poetry includes Collected Poems and Autumn.