In Modern British politics, Edward Heath is the Old Man of the Sea. Not quite as ancient as Methuselah, he has been around for five active decades which sometimes seem like a century. The ocean...
We attach the epithet ‘great’ rather loosely to artists, but there is probably some tacit agreement about which ones deserve it. It doesn’t seem wrong to call W.B. Yeats a great...
On one wall of the gallery a fan of black feathers slowly parts in the centre and folds back like a bird on a perch stowing its wings. From the lower area of another wall, 11 black...
There are times when the act of writing becomes a burden, a fate, even a retribution for the need to be recognised or honoured; when what at first was the joy of creation and self-realisation turns...
Some good places for looking at pictures retain the feel of the private houses they once were (the Phillips Collection in Washington, or Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge), but there are no rules...
In a cold but stuffy bed-sitting room littered with cigarette ends and half-empty cups of tea, a man in a moth-eaten dressing-gown sits at a rickety table, trying to find room for his typewriter...
Jonathan Swift’s last formal composition, before he slipped into the dementia that swallowed him for the last five years of his life, was his own epitaph. In May 1740 he made his will,...
Show a primitive man a submarine, or a sophisticated one an elephant, and both have to have time to get used to the experience before they know what it is they are seeing. So it probably is with...
Twenty years ago Nigel Hamilton wrote a double biography of the literary Brothers Mann, giving equal billing to the celebrated Thomas and the neglected Heinrich. It was certainly time to look...
Some time in the middle of the Seventies in Iran, a Marxist revolutionary named Bizhan Jazani warned from prison against an appeal to religion in the struggle against the Shah. ‘This...
For Tom Wolfe, the New Journalism was defined by the appearance of all kinds of literary devices in non-fiction writing, but chiefly by an unwillingness to adopt the traditional journalistic tone...
Mr Turner is my favourite Edwardian. He sits in a chair under the window. He doesn’t waste a lot of words. And when he laughs he rocks a little. The sky is busy and blue over Richmond....
Shortly after the end of World War Two, a young American professor submitted an article to a leading philosophical journal, explaining a difficult point in one of Spinoza’s arguments. In...
Like many forceful Victorian women, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon had a strong father and an obscure mother. Benjamin Smith, known in the family as ‘the Pater’, came from a formidable...
In February 1940, a Reynolds News reviewer wrote of the three Sitwells, Osbert, Edith and Sacheverell: ‘Now oblivion has claimed them, and they are remembered with a kindly if slightly...
John Hanbury Angus Sparrow (1906-92) was a devotee of the poetry of A.E. Housman. He wrote a vivid introduction to Housman’s verse, whose tight control, both of metre and of homosexual...
Myriam Anissimov’s biography of Primo Levi, first published in French two years ago, begins with a kind of stutter surrounding the writer’s end. The book’s Introduction,...
There is a picture of Mark Rothko taken at his East Hampton studio in 1964. He is sitting on one of those solid wooden beach chairs that stand around on the porches of Long Island summer...