Mrs Hemans – or Hewomans, as Byron called her, for no one was less of a he-man than Felicia – was lavishly praised in her lifetime, and second only to Byron in popularity and sales....
When the American poet Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-1867) travelled to Europe in 1822 he was carrying letters of introduction to Byron, Scott, Southey, Wordsworth, Lafayette and Talleyrand, though...
Had Amy Levy (1861-89) never existed, contemporary criticism would have thought her up. We have been recovering women writers for three decades now, but Levy was also a Jew and probably a...
The New Puritans are not, one of their founder members assures us, ‘a religious movement’. Phew. It is unwise for novelists to become too involved in formulating creeds, and very few...
A flutter on the Booker Prize ought to be a tasty bet. Not this year; the favourites’ odds are short and the serious gambler will wonder if there is enough meat on the bone to justify a...
In the first book of the Iliad, Nestor, the oldest by a generation of the Achaean chieftains at the siege of Troy, intervenes in the argument between Agamemnon and Achilles, telling them they...
for Nicholas Jenkins For my birthday my wife gives me a chainsaw; a shiny blue Makita, big as our child, heavy as an impacted planet. On every part of its body the makers have slapped red warning...
This is the first comprehensive biography of Saul Bellow and the first to receive his co-operation over the complete, ten-year span of its writing. The author, James Atlas, whose biography of...
The contradictory quality of Carlyle’s achievement as intuitive sage, seminal interpreter of German Romanticism, sworn enemy of mechanical and reductive views of life, outrageous ranter and...
The Hard Here on the Hard, you’re welcome to pull up and stay; there’s a flat fee of a quid for parking all day. And wandering over the dunes, who wouldn’t die for the view: an...
Raymond Carver was much taken with the idea that every writer creates a distinctive world: ‘Every great or even very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications...
I would rather have been Dufy with these sails and darkening clouds – well, not Dufy, and this is not Le Sud: better, say, Cranach, had he been given to painting sails against the...
One summer at the fag-end of the 1990s, I had to go out of London to talk to a literary society, of the sort that must have been old-fashioned when the previous century closed. When the day came,...
Trying to define Romanticism has always been a typically Romantic activity, especially in France. The word romantisme first appeared in the year of Napoleon’s coronation (1804) and soon...
Oil production in Baku on the Caspian Sea began in the late 19th century and within a few years the city had become the wealthiest in the Russian Empire, producing more oil than the United...
In an early scene in Horse Heaven, Roberto Acevedo, a first-time jockey, waits in the changing room for his race to be called and looks at the books that have been left there over the years....
Alasdair Gray has opened his Book of Prefaces with what he calls an Advertisement and followed that with an essay ‘On What Led to English Literature’. Since he deliberately does not...
Today – if the date at the bottom of this page is anything to go by – is National Poetry Day. Since ‘today’ is a week or two off, at least for readers in the UK,...