John Mullan

John Mullan’s What Matters in Jane Austen? came out in 2014.

Letter
Replying to John Sutherland’s review of her All Must Have Prizes, Melanie Phillips (Letters, 17 October) lines me up in support of her polemic about falling educational standards. She writes that I told a Daily Telegraph correspondent that ‘standards have declined among applicants’ to the UCL English Department, of which I am admissions tutor and John Sutherland is head.Even in my gloomier moments...

Head in an Iron Safe: Dickens’s Tricks

David Trotter, 17 December 2020

Dickens fought long and hard against the human tendency to focus exclusively on what is of immediate pressing concern in any given situation. His often anodyne protagonists have to compete for our attention...

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Unhoused: anonymity

Terry Eagleton, 22 May 2008

All literary works are anonymous, but some are more anonymous than others. It is in the nature of a piece of writing that it is able to stand free of its begetter, and can dispense with his or...

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Female Heads

John Bayley, 27 October 1988

Since the 18th century, and the novel’s coming of age, inventing female consciousness has become an absorbing masculine activity, a sex-in-the-head game. It is in the male head that...

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