The new volume of poems by my Harvard colleague Jorie Graham, in its US edition, bears on its jacket a detail from Vermeer’s The Astronomer, showing the hand of the astronomer as it...
About fifty or sixty years ago, at the end of a century or more of unenthusiasm, Measure for Measure came into its own. A largely moral or metaphysical explanation of its quality helped it to...
Almost five years ago the Cape Town publishing company David Philip brought out Way Up Way Out, a novel by Harold Strachan. Some time later I was sent a copy of the book by a friend of...
The Tree House Hands on a low limb, I braced, swung my feet loose, hoisted higher, heard the town clock toll, a car breenge home from a club as I stooped inside. Here, I was unseeable. A bletted...
John Banville’s heroes seem to be in search of a centre or subject for their ruminations. Ghosts pester them; voices ring in their ears. Something vital has gone wrong and they must take...
The first answer is Beckett’s in another context – to ‘Mr Beckett they say that you are English?’ he answered ‘au contraire’ – he didn’t say...
During the half-century since 1950, Lindsay Duguid writes in an essay in this collection, ‘the lady novelist turned into the woman writer,’ the historical novel became respectable...
Samuel Richardson’s account of a servant girl’s defence of her virtue against the advances of her lascivious master (‘Mr B’), given in her own letters, made what we now...
Between 1951 and 1954, Wolfgang Koeppen published three scathing, disillusioned novels ridiculing the notion of a new start and a clean slate for West Germany. At the time, perhaps as many as 80...
Sort of eight o’clockish, at a guess, we’re low on petrol, as estimated, and we’re near Kokstad, as calculated, and it is now time to pull in here at the police station, as...
Walk Out to Winter Are we dead, do you think? I thought we were when I visited your art school annexe and saw your things all over the floor. Someone had nailed a dress to a board and thrown a...
For Alice and Marjorie Klee Wyck Laughing One they call Through soaked air on Vancouver Island Where she snores adenoidally in roadmakers’ toolsheds Inches down night-chilled slimy rungs To...
None for forty years, then two in 14 months. Not London buses, but English translations – in this instance, of books by the Swedish novelist Hjalmar Söderberg (1869-1941). The Serious...
Humphrey Carpenter is a practised biographer; he can do groups as well as single persons, but he admits that this group set him a new problem, which was that he remained throughout unsure whether...
Americana Attention, motorists! The flag of the School Patrol is down. Stop! and let the little shavers pour out under the benign smile of the driver, every one in double file, the eye of the...
Towards the end of A.S. Byatt’s first novel about the Potter family, The Virgin in the Garden (1978), the heroine and a clever friend debate the question of whether modern life has rendered...
Big blocks of ice – clear cornerstones – chug down a turning belt toward the blades of a wicked, spinning fan; rotary din of a thousand skates and then powder flies out in a roaring...
child sprung from us both – showing us our ideal, the way – to us! father and mother who in sad existence survive him, like the two extremes – ill-matched in him and sundered...