Wooden Church It’s just a boarded-up shack with a tower Under the blazing summer sky On a back road seldom travelled Where the shadows of tall trees Graze peacefully like a row of gallows,...
During his imprisonment Tasso had religious dreams in the glorious technicolour of the Counter-Reformation: he heard the Last Trump summon him to hell, and had visions of the Virgin.
These lectures were delivered at the New School for Social Research in Greenwich Village during the academic session 1946-47. Arthur Kirsch has pieced them together from the records of four people...
The party was a success. Wordsworth was not too much on his dignity, Lamb was not too drunk. The talk was of Milton and Shakespeare, Voltaire and Newton. Lamb and Keats agreed that Newton had ‘destroyed...
Appropriately for a poet fascinated by the ‘soft fuss’ of flocking birds, these poems rediscover ‘the swift, flitting, swallow-like motion of rhyme’. The verse template in the later poems is syllabic...
Keith Douglas in the desert, 1942. Keith Douglas was 24 when he was killed in action, in 1944, and although quite a few of his poems had by then appeared in anthologies and magazines, he was...
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,...