then thrown back, like a long-finned, too bony fish, I finally took him at his word, and felt the lateness of the hour acquire a dense, rippling aura that weighed down these eyelids, pressed...
Robert Alter established a whole school of literary appreciation of the Bible some twenty years ago with a pioneering book on Biblical narrative. Now he gives us his own translation and...
Towards the end of And When Did You Last See your Father? (1993), Blake Morrison says:Stand them up against grief, and even the greatest poems, the greatest paintings, the greatest novels...
There’s been a bit of fuss recently over whether, and with what definition, the word Blairism should appear in new dictionaries. The Compact Oxford found no room for it, saying that the...
‘Calme bloc ici-bas chu d’un désastre obscur’ (‘calm block fallen here below from some obscure disaster’): this line from Mallarmé’s ‘Le...
‘We all know of writers who just keep writing the same book, but what is sadder is when a true writer seems to run out of books. T.S. Eliot observed that to continue to develop...
The novel must be both very efficient and very wasteful; it thinks like parable but moves like life. Without efficiency – not necessarily concision or compactness, so much as a high degree...
It was inhuman to play cricket at this time of the year, in this heat, but that was precisely what they were doing these days. Moreover, the team was being sent out into that cauldron to pick...
Ironies accumulate in the work of Julian Barnes, like – well, perhaps we’d better not attempt to say what they are like, since Love, etc contains several admonitions on the dangers of...
William Strunk was a standard-bearer for the use of bold, brief English. In The Elements of Style, first published in 1918, the Cornell professor set out his rules of usage and principles of...
Publication – is the Auction Of the Mind of Man – (#788) Editing Emily Dickinson’s poetry is a problem which continues to vex literary scholars and textual critics;...
On the other hand 10/1/40 was a good day at least by January standards – a crisp cold clear day When Majors Reinberger and Hoenmanns allowed their Me109 a virtual fighter – no light...
The Long Home I hadn’t been back in twenty years and he was still here, by the fire, at the far end of the longest counter in Aberdeen – some say Scotland. Not many in, and my...
‘Every critic,’ H.L. Mencken wrote in his notebooks, is in the position, so to speak, of God ... He can smite without being smitten. He challenges other men’s work, and is...
Will Self would have us believe that a volume of Saki’s stories, chosen from eight miles of second-hand books in a New York store, saved his life. That, he says in his introduction to this...
The mastery of the English past tense isn’t a glamorous topic, not these days. That, however, is what Words and Rules is about and, as if to sweep any doubts away, Steven Pinker assures us...
In a little over a decade, more books by black Americans appeared in print than had been published in the entire history of black American writing.
Ever since Lolita ignited the American literary scene in the late 1950s Vladimir Nabokov has been the most famous lepidopterist in the world – indeed, the only one most of us have ever heard of. The...