David Bromwich

Not unlike the God he complains about, Thomas Hardy’s smilingness is often in league with his sadism, and writing poetry was a way for him to plead innocent and guilty at the same time.

There were at least six great issues on which Burke defended the victims of mistreatment with a steely vigour and an unhesitating sympathy.

David Lurie, the soured academic who is the protagonist of J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, earns his living as a professor of ‘communications’ in a Cape Town university (his...

Thanks to David Mamet’s new play Oleanna, the distracted, bumbling and self-regarding male professor has now become the archetypal victim of political correctness. Mamet’s John is...

Hazlitt is sometimes rather like Walt Whitman, democratic, containing multitudes, yet happy with solitary self-communion. In a pleasant essay called ‘A Sun-Bath – Nakedness’,...