He was world-weary from the beginning. Nowhere was safe. Before he was 25 he declared New York to be a ‘giant snake pit’, Los Angeles to be ‘quel hole’. Naples was...
‘… metals talking among themselves, metals that first meet above the earth …’Adam Zagajewski, Another BeautyI thought about it walking home.One of those relentlessly...
In which all outstanding problems of art history are settled to everyone’s satisfaction. What mattered more for Manet and Monet, That Manet had money or Monet had manners? Mattered to what,...
The dust jacket of the final volume of Bevis Hillier’s epic life of John Betjeman shows the poet laureate seized by giggles. In this lengthy coda to Hillier’s authorised biography...
Minds have been made up about John Updike. A typical review will begin by grudgingly acknowledging the brilliance of his ‘style’ – as if Updike’s style were a set of...
As everyone knows, Sherlock Holmes only appeared to plunge into the Reichenbach Falls, locked in a deadly embrace with Professor Moriarty. In fact, using his knowledge of ‘baritsu, or the...
I: Tollund, after 2000 Years I found you smoked in the loam, Leathered by the loop of time. Lithe earthling. Bog-bottled. I turned out the tissues of your paunch To view your last meal. Perhaps...
When The Dunciad in Four Books hit the stands in the autumn of 1743, making The New Dunciad old hat after barely eighteen months, Samuel Richardson grumbled in a letter to his friend and sometime...
On 15 February 1902, James Joyce, aged 20, read a paper on James Clarence Mangan to the Literary and Historical Society of what is now University College, Dublin. It was a brash performance....
Goddess Well now, it really is you, and after how many months? I had ceased keeping track. No, not given up, never that. I should die if that were true. But still – was it some affront?...
In 1945, Somerset Maugham contributed a list to Redbook magazine of what were, in his opinion, ‘the ten best novels in the world’. Maugham’s choices were neither surprising nor...
A controlling symbol or organising detail or image can be sensed fizzing away like a lozenge of meaning in most contemporary short stories. The delicate art of these stories allows the writer to...
Andrew Miller’s first two novels, Ingenious Pain (1997) and Casanova (1998), were extended fantasies set in an imaginatively embellished 18th century. In his third novel, Oxygen (2001),...
The Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 1938. An old pedlar and his young son stand on a moonlit stage bare but for the ruins of a great house and a leafless tree. The Old Man declares that the house is still...
I tried to work up a little poetry – ‘the ever-restless spirit of man’ – ‘the mysterious, awe-inspiring wilderness of ice’ – but it was no good; I suppose...
The Narrator, during the break in chapter, gets up to stretch beneath a skylight and hears seagulls, small girls running. So many pages since he listened last that he can’t recall how it...
Ian McEwan’s vividly and meticulously imagined novels often focus on characters whose imaginations are either unwholesomely vivid or dryly meticulous. At one end of the spectrum lurk the...
Chekhov biographers are lucky: they don’t have to face the problem of spending a good deal of time studying the life of someone they are liable to end up disliking intensely. Lawrence...