Praying (Attempt of 6 June ’03) I wake and one of them is still there, still talking, sudden jolts of hand as if to slap open the air, garbage waiting at the curb, myself a slave, still,...
This movie version of the play will just about do. It has most of the virtues and most of the faults endemic to such ventures, but it exposes the latter less grossly than some. As Shylock Pacino...
Tom Wolfe is, in many ways, an outrageous figure – with his white suit and cane, his glib social analyses, and his delusions of grandeur. For three decades he has been saying that his...
What was it Proust said about paradise? That all paradises are lost paradises? That the only true paradise is a lost paradise? That it isn’t paradise until it’s lost? That paradise is...
This book begins to narrate its story, or stories, with the picture on the jacket; the story has begun, then, even before we’ve reached the first page. After a dedication to the...
Shakespeare scholarship in the mid 19th century, one gathers, was not only very competitive but also morally dangerous. It could threaten the virtue, even on occasion the sanity, of its...
This morning in November in the bar of the Angel there is an open fire. I tell you this so you imagine it as though the bar in the Angel were a place that has been given to itself, full of...
The list of Leonardo da Vinci’s accomplishments is long and famously various – painter, inventor, anatomist, mathematician, musician and so on – but it seldom includes the word...
According to E.P. Thompson, The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Rights of Man are the two ‘foundation texts’ of the English working-class movement. It is above all in John Bunyan, he...
The public bus into Santo Domingo, sheer Delight, rocking chaos of stops and starts, And a Dominican woman, thin, potentially Attractive, sits on an impromptu jump seat Facing the passengers, her...
Chekhov may be divine, but he is responsible for much sinning on earth. The contemporary short story is essentially sub-Chekhovian. It is most obviously indebted to what Shklovsky called...
In George Peele’s Elizabethan play The Old Wives’ Tale, a character called Jack interrogates the ‘wandering knight’ Eumenides: ‘Are you not the man, sir (deny it if...
When Thackeray died in 1863 his eldest daughter, Anny, who was 26, was left not just with a famous name and a sum of money but with an established place in London literary life. Affectionate and...
Ireland has less of a tradition of literary realism than England, though for an English critic to say so may require a degree of diplomacy. It may sound like saying that Ireland is deficient in...
One of the most eloquent denunciations of plagiarism is delivered by Tristram Shandy. ‘Shall we forever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel...
Across Brooklyn This is the street where they still make coffins: the little workshops, side by side. I pass them with my daughter on our walk to the river. Are we seeking the bridge itself, or...
Novelists are a bunch of lazy good-for-nothings, obviously. It’s a necessary part of the job, that languid repose; that successful weakening of the usual human determination to do something...
All José Saramago’s novels tell a story. Each is predicated on a suggestive and compelling hypothesis: what would happen if the Iberian peninsula were to become detached from the...