Why should anyone wish to write the history of a Royal house? On one level, the answer to that question is easy: most of us learnt history in childhood in terms of Angevins, Plantaganets and so...
It was in the winter of 1929 that the young American scholar Helen Gill Viljoen went to Brantwood, Ruskin’s old home on Coniston Water, to pursue her postgraduate researches. In that...
William Godwin is a man who cries out to be the subject of a life. He has everything: a repressed personality, ripe for psychoanalysis; a role in the high dramas of his wife Mary Wollstonecraft,...
Most of those who made the new Ireland have gone to their graves leaving no memoir behind them. For this reason alone, the appearance of Dublin made me, the autobiography of Todd Andrews, is to...
One of the pleasures of reading Peacock in the Thirties, when I first read him, was that he was without acrimony. He enabled us to relive the great battles of ideas in the 19th century without an...
The scene: a New York literary dinner some nine months ago. The topic: who I’d seen or hadn’t seen since my arrival, who I planned to see, etc. Me: ‘Well, I’ve seen...
For the last 45 years – ever since Matthiessen’s book in 1935 – the steady flow of critical lucubration on T.S. Eliot has gone on unabated. Not particularly contentious –...
Several authors have died in the course of Britain’s current and by now customary hard winter. V.S. Pritchett writes, nearby, about one of them, and I would like to write about another...
For forty years, in person and in writing, Raymond Mortimer was an ornament of English literary journalism. He was at his best, I think, in the querulous Thirties and Forties when he was Literary...
Lawrence felt that Hardy’s Sue Bridehead was ‘no woman’ because ‘that which was female in her she wanted to consume within the male force … in the fire of...
The 19th century loved George Sand: the Brownings, the Carlyles, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Ruskin, Whitman all read her; Arnold preferred her to Dickens; George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë were...
I don’t trust Mr Solomon Volkov an inch, and as for Miss Antonina Bouis, the question of trust hardly arises: Shostakovich is supposed to have said that ‘Hamlet was screwing...
The Palestinians are the people who were living in Palestine when it was decided to build a Jewish homeland there and who fled from their homes in great numbers when the Jewish state was...
Wittgenstein’s famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is written in a style that is austere and sometimes aphoristic. ‘The world is everything that is the case.’ ‘A picture...
Is there a British Marxism? David McLellan’s new book offers, implicitly, an answer. In his comprehensive survey of ‘Marxism after Marx’, one of the 24 chapters is devoted to...
Bernard Levin recently summed up in one sentence the most ambiguous form of mental sickness in our age: ‘But there are those who live by an enervated reason that owns no master in the soul,...
In the early 17th century, more perhaps than in any period of our history, political argument was argument about the past: about precedents and about pedigrees. Sir Robert Cotton, an antiquary in...
Staying in Castries for the wedding was a young man called Mr Kennaway. When he watches me I can see that he doesn’t think I am pretty. Oh God, let me be pretty when I grow up. Jean Rhys...