A bleary chiel, monger o targes an dirks redds his windae. Neist Holyrood Kirk a shop chock fu o fudge. Taxis judder on the setts. Naething mixter- maxter here: some douce sea-maws tak these...
Some moderately interesting statistics are thrown up by The Book Sales Yearbook 2001 (Bookseller Publications, £299). For example: the top five consolidated publishing groups –...
When Doris Lessing brought out the first two volumes of her autobiography, Under My Skin (1994) and Walking in the Shade (1997), she did so, as she explained, partly in...
They came for Comrade Prince D.S. Mirsky, ‘aristocrat of critics’, some time in the night of 2 to 3 June 1937. He lived in a high, bare room which had a fine view over Moscow. It was...
As a group we were somewhat vulnerable and are so today. My brother-in-law has fixed me a tower in the mill, from whose oriel I can see the bluebottles who nag heaven with their unimportance. But...
Condition of England writing is the product of a perceived acceleration in the pace of social change. We owe the term to Carlyle, writing in the 1830s, when the ‘Condition of England...
Where other studies have examined the history of the novel in relation to romance, to the rise of the middle class or to emergent forms of subjectivity – the discours du jour – Leah...
Every spring since 1992, a volume called New Writing has been published under the auspices of the British Council. This year the Arts Council has joined in the sponsorship fun, and the anthology...
The publishers describe this book as ‘lean’, which may be taken to refer to its style, though it also serves as a euphemism for ‘very short, especially considering the...
George Birmingham, a Church of Ireland clergyman and novelist, wrote in 1926 that the Irish conflict, whatever its roots, could now be reduced to a matter of style: In Catholicism there seems to...
The Installation Until it all turned into a waxworks The lot of them In the same old rooms Same lamps, chairs, wainscoting The piano still there, out of tune Sheet music under the seat A period...
Can it be, as Jackie Wullschlager maintains, that in the 1840s and 1850s Hans Christian Andersen was ‘the most famous writer in Europe’, and that ‘two centuries after his birth...
John Carey’s new book, like his last one, The Intellectuals and the Masses, is a little swizzle-stick perfectly designed for flattening airy literary bubbles. Surprisingly, it is likable,...
The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play. They throw earth over your head and it is finished for ever. Pascal, Pensées 1 Refuge in San Remo won’t work out. Local...
For more than thirty years, until her death in 1965, Dawn Powell lived and worked ceaselessly in Greenwich Village. She produced 15 novels, set in Manhattan or the small towns of her native Ohio,...
Victor Pelevin, the internationally fêted bad boy of Russian fiction, whose 1993 collection of short stories, The Blue Lantern, has this month been reissued in English (Faber, £6.99),...
‘Everything happens at once’ in the year charted by Jayne Anne Phillips in MotherKind – her heroine Kate becomes and loses a mother. The book records tiny actions and reactions:...
Name: Meme Jumai. Occupation: Farmer.Residence: Ikerre-Oti, Delta State, Nigeria. Date of Birth: 5 June 1950. Date of Death: 15 June 2000. Cause of Death: Awaiting Inquest. 1 June 2000. When I...