Search Results

“... Borges died on 14 June, in Geneva – which bare fact virtually calls for an ‘English papers please copy,’ as they used to say, so complacently scant and grudging were the notices which we were given to read at the time. There was much Englishness about him, starting with his mother’s family, which was English, but obvious also in the plain way that he wrote, and in the humour with which he used to deprecate his own high literary standing ...”

“... In 1964, the quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth, two very different books appeared. Anthony Burgess’s tribute to the poet, Nothing Like the Sun, was a boisterous biographical novel full of sugared sack and bawdry, with sombre undertones of decay. Taking literally the references in Shakespeare’s sonnets to a mistress ‘black as hell’, Burgess made the Dark Lady of his story a voluptuous East Indian who, after seducing the dramatist, inspired the tragic plays of his maturity by giving him a dose of syphilis ...”

“... and so to the extent that he is successful we hear what he hears. But then what do we hear in Anthony Kerrigan’s Ficciones (1962), which has translations by Kerrigan himself, Alastair Reid, Anthony Bonner, Helen Temple and Ruthven Todd? Or in Donald Yates and James Irby’s ...”

“... it into Gombrich’s piece on Schiller, ‘The Symbol of the Veil’, one can only concur with Anthony Storr’s observation, elsewhere in the volume, that psychoanalysis illuminates the traffic between life and art more suggestively than it can the structures of creativity. When H.D. first visited Freud she shocked him by gazing, not at the Professor, but ...”