In 1979 there appeared Norman Mailer’s long book The Executioner’s Song – a thousand paperback pages, as it subsequently became, on the strange case of Gary Gilmore, the...
Hech, sirs, yon bit opium Tract’s a desperate interesting confession. It’s perfectly dreadfu’, yon pouring in upon you o’ oriental imagery. But nae wunner. Sax thousand...
‘It is strange,’ Charles Tomlinson writes, ‘to have met the innovators of one’s time only when age had overtaken them.’ The innovators to whom he refers are those...
As many letters in The Habit of Being show, Flannery O’Connor was plagued long before her death with Deep Readers from little colleges offering outlandish ‘interpitations’ of...
The first sentence of Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope against Hope is one of the most memorable openings in all literature: ‘After slapping Alexei Tolstoi in the face, M. immediately...
For readers who are more interested in literature than in literary society those sacred monsters who live in anecdote and legend rather than in their work are always something of an...
David Bindman does not think that Hogarth was joking when he gave one of his contemporaries, John Nichols, a comic demonstration of minimalism: it took the form of a diagram composed of three...
‘Historia locuta est. Sed historiae obloquitur ipse vates et contra testatur sensus legentis’ (History has spoken. But the poet’s own words answer back, and the reader’s...
These volumes are issued as a pair, with a single index, and rightly, because they hold together for a coherent segment of Carlyle’s life. The dominant theme of the two is the writing of
Is it a wise or a foolish man who, after more than seventy years in this hard world, comes before it as an optimist? The handsome head of John Redcliffe-Maud, alias Sir John Maud, GCB, CBE and...
Alice James died, not trembling, but, said Katharine Loring, ‘very happy’ in the knowledge that the Last Trump was at hand.
‘I like the revivalist coup de foudre for its recognition that true revelation can instantly change a man, so that his sins simply fall away from him, to be replaced by present joy and...
It is funny of Jack Kramer to recount his ‘40 years in tennis’ under the title The Game, given that he was a pioneer of tennis as a business. I received my serious call to a life of...
In the reign of Henry VIII, when a man was arrested for treason (an arrest which, among the eminent, tended to be equal to a conviction, with the usual consequences), his papers were confiscated...
Le Mystère Picasso is how Clouzot entitled his famous film, in which the artist was seen at work before our eyes, and for most of its eight decades our century has been vainly trying to...
As the Duke of Wellington was stung to complain, the British officers in the Peninsular War were ‘the most indefatigable writers of letters that exist in the world’. Even at this late...
Jack ‘did a Jack’ and missed our father’s funeral. He had taken his new girl to the Gargoyle Club the night before and had woken with such a monumental hangover that the train...
A century ago Joseph Chamberlain was the Tony Benn of his time, the bogeyman of moderate and conservative opinion. The point is familiar to historians of the period, but never easy to convey....