Anthony Powell, suave in his interwar Morris Minor. Reviewers are always sternly instructed to check page proofs against finished copies of books, and I do, I will. But the proofs of Anthony...
Richard Holmes published Shelley: The Pursuit in 1974. More than a decade later, in Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985), he recalled how obsessive his engagement gradually...
Andrew Maunder’s introduction to his new edition of Ellen Wood’s chronicle of scandalous goings-on among the Victorian middle classes claims that East Lynne may be ‘one of the...
In the penultimate chapter of David Copperfield, David and Agnes, after ten years of uneventful but blissful marriage – ‘I had advanced in fame and fortune, my domestic joy was...
In his undergraduate days at Trinity College Dublin in the early 1960s, Derek Mahon cast a spell over his contemporaries, as he would cast a spell over his early readers. He had wit, taste and a...
Who can think of sex at a time like this, in a toilet a mile up in the troposphere? You won’t find that in the Kama Sutra. I sit in this cheap seat and rub my clammy palms all the way from...
Days of German St Francis didn’t speak German to the robins he fed, nor did Scott as he trudged through the snow, but I did as I crossed the border to Alsace-Lorraine all that winter of...
5 January. A lorry delivers some stone lintels at No. 61. The driver is a stocky, heavy-shouldered, neatly-coiffed woman of around sixty. While she doesn’t actually do the unloading she...
This is a collection of eight stories, the oldest first published in 1975, the most recent in 1999; so they punctuate the entire, brief career of a writer who never yielded to the temptation to go on...
‘In a way he was like the country he lived in, everything came too easily to him.’ Mrs McFarlane told me she heard someone say this in a movie. There was nothing in the movie that...
Koba is in a country no a wilderness province the size of Scotland – nine months of ice and snow they live in caves where his fellow exiles fear the hard glints in his eyes his yellow smoky...
The day he first met Wyndham Lewis, shortly after the end of the First World War, Ernest Hemingway was teaching Ezra Pound how to box. The encounter took place in Paris, where Pound had a studio,...
Henry Green’s masterpieces, like Party Going (1939) and Loving (1945), are devoted to demonstrating the hollowness of traditional loyalties and roles, for all the world as if he were a fictional anthropologist...
Dryden of course neither wrote nor adapted a Hamlet. But sometimes negatives, or questions, can say as much as positives. And Dryden is perhaps an odder, a more involved figure than might be...
Was God created by a woman, a writer who dreamed up the early stories in the Bible? Differences in vocabulary and style suggest that the Old Testament is a composite of various sources. The...
These figs missed the picker moved to pluck tokens of love or welcome to strangers, missed bird, missed casual snacker, so are burst and outspread as red as hibiscus, scuffed pistil opera plush,...
For Colleen If not the giant redwoods taking centuries to reach the light, nor the lights- camera-action typhoons regular as clockwork in the murky Tonga Bar, nor, perched above LA, the...
for the commemoration at St Andrews University, October 2000 All the Fergussons are black I’ve heard said in the Outback. Sub rosa, the Scots empire ranged wide. I hope Scotland proportions...