Joyce’s prose is ‘beautifully written’, as they used to say. Written, like his poems, in the old style of the Nineties. Paradoxically, it is not composed but spoken. The voice...
‘Happy are they,’ Hazlitt wrote, ‘for whom the guiding star of their youth still shines from afar.’ Judging from this hagiography, the Chancellor of the Exchequer must be...
Most male novelists have learned to read at their mothers’ knee. Only one comes to mind who learned to write novels from observing his mother. The essence of what we think of as the...
Frederick Ashton was an avid gossip, while also dreading the idea that his life – and his homosexuality – might become matters of prurient interest. He claimed to have destroyed all...
Derry 30 January 1972. After the coldest night of the winter, Sunday morning began with an effervescence of light and frost. The ground was ringing iron as a few early citizens moved through the...
There was a moment – probably in the Thirties, as Smuts and Hertzog were embarking on political exercises aimed at ‘nation-building’ – when the term...
Oscar wilde is one of literature’s most bankable brand-names. As the illustrations in Merlin Holland’s The Wilde Album demonstrate, this was as true in his fin de siècle as in...
Writing about Goya’s Black Paintings in Art After Modernism , a collection of essays published in 1984 by the New Museum in downtown New York, Kathy Acker wrote: ‘The only reaction...
Laetitia Pilkington has been remembered chiefly as a source of information about Swift. In their happier days, she and her husband were friendly with Swift, whom it was in their interest to...
2 January. I’m sent a complimentary (sic) copy of Waterstone’s Literary Diary which records the birthdays of various contemporary literary figures. Here is Dennis Potter on 17 May,...
Has anyone ever been unkind in public about Bill Deedes? I rather doubt it. I was in the House of Commons with him from 1959 until 1964, and also had the occasional dealing with him when he...
Einstein’s life story is almost as well known as his science. He was born in 1879 into a middle-class Jewish family in southern Germany, and went to school in Munich, where he is supposed...
Paul Auster is so implicated in his own fictions that it is often hard to tell whether his covert appearances there represent a Modernist textual teasing or a baser vanity; whether his walk-on...
I made my first visit to Belfast when I was almost 11, late in 1939. The war had just started, and Italy had joined Germany in aggression. My father was the sergeant-in-charge of the Royal Ulster...
Fintan O’Toole’s publishers announce that Richard Brinsley Sheridan has been generally ill-served by biographers, ‘who rehash the familiar outlines of his story every decade or...
‘Maybe this is a detective story,’ a character thinks in John Edgar Wideman’s novel Philadelphia Fire (1990). It’s a reasonable suspicion, and would be for anyone in any...
Tramming was one of the most painful and soul-destroying jobs in a pit. Only pits like the two in our village employed trammers. Other, better maintained pits in adjacent areas had high, wide...
In her portraits Elizabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun did her very best to give a pleasing account of the facts of the flesh. The faces are attractive, the expressions forthcoming and responsive....