I first met Jonathan’s knees. This was because Cambridge sofas in the 1950s had broken springs. Once they had buoyed up culture heroes like Rupert Brooke, John Cornford or Guy Burgess.
You get told, repeatedly, that the protesters are ‘children’, as young as 14 or 15 or even younger. This is supposed to suggest that the protests are in some sense trivial, though of course...
R ather D.J. Taylor than me, when it comes to untangling the unbelievably complicated and messy love lives of the so-called Horizon circle: the people who clustered adoringly around Cyril...
I n 1951, at the height of his celebrity and a year before he received his knighthood, the historian Lewis Bernstein Namier was sufficiently well known to appear – only lightly...
Wittgenstein wasn’t particularly impressed by Bertrand Russell’s adoration. If his philosophical capacities were as exceptional as Russell seemed to think, then this was a curious...
Every age creates its own Chaucer. For Eustache Deschamps, a contemporary, he was the ‘grant translateur’. For Hoccleve, a disciple, he was ‘my deere maistir’ and ‘the firste...
O f the many remedies Cole Porter used to kill pain – boys, drink, luxury – the most powerful was song. In October 1937, at the age of 46, out for an early morning canter at the...
M ichael Neve died on 9 October. I first met him in 1995, at a funeral. We had been taught Nietzsche by the same lecturer at Cambridge; that had been enough academia for me, but Michael had...
In our age of selfies, no one could pretend that the camera never lies. It is capable of obfuscating and deceiving every bit as much as the people who compose, take and edit the photos. But that is not...
One afternoon in June 1962 Octavio Paz and I, until then only acquainted through letters, met at the studio of the painter Juan Soriano in Mexico City. From there we went walking down Paseo de la...
O ne Saturday some years ago, while cycling over Wearmouth Bridge in the centre of Sunderland, my young daughters and I got mixed up with the football crowd. ‘There’s that...
H arold Bloom, who died at the age of 89 just before the publication of The American Canon, made his name in 1973 with The Anxiety of Influence. It was a great title, which soon became a...
As we glide along the path of our own destruction, this is how we normalise it – one tweet at a time.
How can a girl believe in an institution that asks her to gather blackmail material to make it easier for her country to begin an illegal war? How can a girl believe in a government that asks its people...
Whether Hitler gets into our minds, or we mislay something of our own inside his, it’s clear that this strange and hateful man, who has been dead for 74 years, is still messing with our heads.
While his men were getting into position, he noticed that something was blocking the elevation of the machine gun on the front of his armoured car. He got out to fix it, taking the opportunity to ‘seize...
Bears, we have been led to believe, are super-cuddly – right up until the moment when they rip your throat out.’
When David Jones refers to the predicament of persons of Welsh affinity ‘whose “medium” is English’, his use of the word hovers over its painterly sense, as though a choice were...