We owe a large debt to the famous chapter on Robinson Crusoe in Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel. Watt really made us use our wits about that novel and forced us to relate it to our most...
Most people would call Mr Burgess a prodigiously fluent writer, but he would demur, pointing out that a professional should be capable of a thousand words a day, which is 365,000 a year, or five...
This year, despite the downward drift in almost every sphere, we are celebrating the 300th birthday of the still dearly beloved Handel in the midst of an astonishing revival of English...
‘The bird that I hope to catch in the net of this play is … the true quality of experience in a group of people, that cloudy, flickering, evanescent – fiercely charged! –...
In the academic study of philosophy in English-speaking countries Spinoza is not usually considered an indispensable source for the central tradition, on a level with Descartes, Locke, Hume and...
On 1 June 1948, Edmund Wilson sent to Vladimir Nabokov a copy of Volume VI of Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex, French edition. What had caught Wilson’s attention...
Lord Roll is a very distinguished man, who has levitated over a period of 70 years or so from a small village in an obscure corner of Central Europe to the topmost rank of the British...
It is gratifying to have a book reissued after 25 years. My A Hermit Disclosed was first published in 1960.* At that time I was not allowed to mention the names of certain people who were then...
Fifteen years after his death Mishima is everywhere. Penguin has just brought out Hagakure, Mishima’s idiosyncratic interpretation of the 18th-century code of samurai ethics, and The Life...
Earlier this summer, during two and a half days of sun, I was persuaded to join a Wordsworth and Coleridge pilgrimage in Somerset. One of the chief attractions was a rumour that Richard Holmes,...
‘I’, declares a mysterious character in one of the short sketches that makes up this collection of fugitive pieces, ‘am a Traveller in Romance.’ It does not seem an apt...
Joan Wyndham began her diary on the brink of her deflowering and of the deflowering of Europe – the latter being a far less engrossing subject to this sexy, self-centred girl. The value of...
‘Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is part of an Englishman’s constitution.’ Henry Crawford’s comment in Mansfield Park is a reminder that...
Wittgenstein predicted that his work would not be properly understood and appreciated. He said it was written in a different spirit from that of the main stream of European and American...
Schizophrenia is now held to be one of the major illnesses of mankind, but its recognition as a clinical syndrome is of relatively recent origin. There is something very odd about the sudden...
It is only fair to preface anything you write about Degas with a few of his own remarks. He challenges you to prove relevance and competence. He wanted to be ‘illustrious and...
The 40th anniversary of Victory in Europe is a good vantage-point from which to look back on the career of the Supreme Allied Commander under whom in the West that victory was won. It should come...
On the eve of the First World War, London still beckoned aspiring American poets. Ezra Pound arrived in 1908, Robert Frost in 1912, and T.S. Eliot in 1914. When Pound arrived he was only 23,...