Is psychoanalysis flirtation, as Adam Phillips has suggested? Even when not sexually charged, psychoanalysis liberates longing from a deadening fidelity to the past. It lets dreaming off the hook...
When Bookering last year I found most of the novels fitted into one of two categories, which I began to think of as ‘Conscious Modern’ and ‘Pattern Naive’. Pattern Naive,...
Cancer must sell almost as many books as cookery: not just old-fashioned self-help guides to detection or prevention, tips on how to survive the chemotherapy or colostomy (now lavishly...
My mother’s return from Galway some while ago was delayed because things got very stormy in Oughterard. I had known there was a chance she might run into difficulties sorting through her...
Whatever you think of Hardy, you have to admit that Jude the Obscure is one of the most gripping books ever written about university entrance requirements. For a novel about an equally...
‘Time! It’s passing. Oh, God. Time!’ mourned the legal adviser to Oz, transfixed by his wristwatch after his first and last joint. Who said nothing profound ever came of smoking...
Of all the Hollywood beauties of her time, only Katharine Hepburn had the grace to be irritating. She was beautiful, but not always, her looks could change from shot to shot. She was oddly...
The struggle for national independence often takes on a significance which transcends its immediate and local aim. Its leaders, who require resources of courage, sacrifice and determination much...
Between 1865 and 1871 Dostoevsky wrote three of the world’s greatest novels, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Possessed – and two remarkable novellas, The Gambler and The...
‘This is the story of simple working people – their hardships, their humours, but above all their heroism.’ The epigraph which introduced the 1939 screen version of The Stars...
Loved and loathed, Patrick White loomed over Australian literature for decades as a distant, grimacing colossus. There was simply no way around him, no way he could not be taken into...
Croisset, 15-16 May 1852. Saturday-Sunday, 1 a.m.The small hours of Sunday morning find me in the middle of a page that has taken me all day and is still far from finished. I am putting it aside...
Anyone who has ever taken the slightest interest in Shakespeare and his times owes a great deal to Edmond Malone. It was Malone who in a single month, June 1789, discovered not only the papers of...
Never before has so much been known about the world, and the time has long passed – if it ever existed – when one person could collect it all in a single consciousness. Science is the...
It would seem improper to begin a review of a biography by considering whether its subject was better described as ‘fair of face’ or‘ill-favoured’ if the subject were not...
Even after 35 years, the simplest questions about Cuban politics remain almost beyond the reach of objective analysis. Is the Castro regime a tyranny which can only perpetuate itself by resort to...
‘H ow could a man who looked like a resident of the Ozarks and talked like a saloon bar brawler set himself up as pilot of a sophisticated, elegant magazine?’ This was Ben...
Reflecting on the cultural consequences of the Civil War, the Southern literary critic, Lewis Simpson, wonders how Emerson, the quintessential New England intellectual, could have failed to...