Of Philip Larkin’s many ostentatiously ‘less deceived’ accounts of family life, among my favourites is the soaring riff that concludes his introduction to All What Jazz...
Letitia Elizabeth Landon was one of the 19th century’s most romantic figures. When The Improvisatrice came out in 1824, she was described in the press as the female Byron, the English...
Ihad planned to become a doctor – I imagined working in a hospital in a tropical country like Dr Schweitzer. I graduated in 1963, but being unable to afford medical school I joined the...
Staying in Castries for the wedding was a young man called Mr Kennaway. When he watches me I can see that he doesn’t think I am pretty. Oh God, let me be pretty when I grow up.
Jean Rhys...
It is a commonplace assumption among modern historians that minority rule has always had to rely on devices to preserve social distance. These have usually consisted of distinctions of dress,...
If it is the job of a poet to cast spells, H.D. was very good at it. She was a master of the striking launch, the bravura speech act, sustained intensity. Her work can seem like a high-wire performance, a hierophantic authority balancing over the abyss of kitsch; what’s amazing is how often she pulls it off.
Awake at 4 a.m. when the sleeping pills wear off, she finds a voice and writes the poems of her life, ones that will make her a myth like Lazarus, like Lorelei. But now she knows that her conception of her life, psychological and otherwise, is no longer tenable, and never was. Now what? ‘I love you for listening,’ Plath, abandoned and alone, tells her analyst Ruth Beuscher in a letter late in 1962. The rest of us are listening at last.
Labour moves right when the economy is doing well and there’s money to spend, then left when the economy looks to be in crisis and structural reform is needed. Structural reform is certainly needed today.
The daughter of Samuel Holland, a prosperous Cheshire farmer and land agent, the wife of William Stevenson, a scholar and writer of some reputation, and the mother of Elizabeth Gaskell, one of...
John Lennon gave his famous interview to Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone magazine at the end of 1970, a few days before the release of the most important solo-Beatle record, John Lennon/Plastic Ono...
Sometime in the late autumn of 1977, I went to a book party that was held in the Rosebery Room of the House of Lords. Why I went I can’t think – the volume was some piece of unreadable...
For a lifelong opponent of the establishment, Tariq Ali gets on strikingly well with some of its members: those diplomats, spooks and former spooks who think seriously, as he sees it, about the arrangement of power in the world.
Joined for all time on the title-page of the Book that Made the Modern World are Isaac Newton (who wrote the Principia Mathematica) and Samuel Pepys (who, as President of the Royal Society,...
Penelope Fitzgerald wrote ‘The Death of a Poet’ in 1980 or 1981, intending it to form part of a group portrait of the writers published by Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop in...
Among the minor characters to appear in this biography, the least important (he only gets two sentences) is a manservant whom Britten employed early in 1950, just before starting work on his...