Comically observant, admonitory, but not quite reproachful, very English in its good-humoured and long-suffering manner, The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe is in more ways than one a caution. The...
When Americans test the health of their republic, scrutinise the civic virtue of their fellow citizens, or worry that religion is playing too large or too small a role in public life, the text...
If there can be said to be such a thing as a Victorian ‘frame of mind’, it must be a broad category indeed to contain two such different representatives as John Henry Newman and James...
Authors can be terrible liars, and never more so than when they are in the autobiographical vein. Like salesmen, they are at their most dangerous when most sincere. Roth’s publishers...
Renato Serra, who died heroicaly in action on the Isonzo front in August 1915, wrote in his diary a week before that ‘war becomes like life itself. It’s all there is: not a passion...
Only at the very last did my path cross that of the Cambridge spies. It was on a warm, sunny afternoon last May at Kuntsevo Cemetery on the western outskirts of Moscow, when they buried Kim...
These are the first of Georges Perec’s wonderful and extraordinary writings to be translated into English. Perec has been a household name in France since the runaway success of his first...
Few countries were less promising for aspiring politicians than Syria in the Sixties. To begin with, the chances of merely staying alive during the political struggles were not high. Then, even...
George Hayim, candid homosexual masochist, globe-scampering self-gratifier, unabashed lifelong idler, one-book novelist, offers, for what it’s worth, his life story. Born in 1920, the son...
Christopher Hill has shown literary critics the way before now. Many must have felt at least mildly chastened by his remarks in Milton and the English Revolution (1977), no less forceful for...
In November 1931, La Gazette médicale in Paris carried a curiously vehement piece on the treatment of bleeding gums. It was signed Dr Louis F. Destouches and it took issue, in a blizzard of...
Stephen Wall sees as crucial those passages in An Autobiography where Trollope rhapsodises on his equality with the personages of his fiction: ‘There is a gallery of them, and of all in...
Publications about the Great War continue to proliferate, hardly needing additional stimulation from the 70th anniversary of the Armistice. The present books are just a few on the subject to...
Brecht thought opera kulinarisch, a cooked-up business – a view that has been widely quoted without exerting much influence. Opera still dominates the kitchen of the performing arts in the...
What constitutes an American writer’s landscape? In Great Britain it’s common to refer to ‘Brontë country’ or ‘Hardy country’. The Lake District belongs...
At a critical moment in The House of Mirth (1905), just after her humiliating confrontation with Gus Trenor compels Lily Bart to realise how terrifyingly ‘alone’ she is, ‘in a...
As novelists often intimate, personalities only really get their chance in novels. There they can be built up, intensified, put properly on display. In real life, they fade into uncertainty like...
The June 1947 issue of Life Magazine contains an article called ‘Young US Writers’, a round-up of 11 promising post-war authors. Of the 11, three are well-known today; of this famous...