In the Theaetetus, Socrates is puzzled about how we make use of what we already know. Take a mathematician, he says. Such a person must already have in his head all the numbers he will work with....
‘We all have at least one terrible friend. Each one of us is someone’s terrible friend.’ The epigram was coined by a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge called Jack Gallagher,...
Not You Again Thought I’d write you this poem. Yes, I know you don’t need it. No, you don’t have to thank me for it. Just want to kind of get it off my chest and drop it in the...
After a decade or more dominated by special studies of anonymous or bestselling authors now suitable for academic recovery, Philip Fisher’s Still the New World marks a return in some ways...
It still exists, the bathhouse Where the young Augustine washed himself, But now it is everywhere And the waters of the spirit All steam, make wraiths out of men In Paris, Constantinople, Mosques...
Feminism is fiftysomething if you start counting from The Second Sex, and, like Toril Moi, a lot of academic women are taking stock. The good news is that wherever positive discrimination in...
Hanif Kureishi got me beaten up. Admittedly it was by my dad. At home, as at the factory where for more than half of his life he had been a semi-skilled machine operator, he preferred to...
Marcel Aymé’s novel Le Passemuraille, about a man who can walk through walls, would have interested Thomas Caulfield Irwin (1823-92). Irwin is cited in Paul Muldoon’s To...
Evening station: two bucket seats, glasses on a handy sill. The bristly sea half-fills the big basin of the headlands; on lower slopes crocosmia smoulders in the coarse grass; hydrangeas spill...
Novelists can be lucky in their editors, in their friends, in their mentors and even in their pupils. Sometimes they are generous or sentimental enough to fictionalise the relationship. In Keep...
According to the OED, a ‘rebus’ is ‘an enigmatic representation of a name, word or phrase by figures, pictures, arrangement of letters etc, which suggest the syllables of which...
Early on in his new novel, James Buchan employs an image of which he is evidently fond: that of two mirrors placed face to face, and the unique and disconcerting effect which they produce, of...
Simon Armitage likes to have it both ways. He is the streetwise poet who is at home in a Radio 1 studio; but he is also the ambitious literary figure who aspires to ‘nothing less’...
No One in the Room And here I was asking About some child I saw on the street Carrying an Easter Lily. It was spring then. She came my way In a crowd of turned backs And emphatically Blank faces,...
In 1916, Private Nikolai Gumilev and two of his superiors came under fire on the bank of the River Dvina north of St Petersburg; the two officers jumped into the nearest trench. Gumilev...
In 1978, Susie Orbach wrote a slim, successful book with a catchy title – so catchy you didn’t need to read the book to feel you knew what it was all about. Fat Is a Feminist Issue....
IX. But what word was it Word that overnight showed up on all the walls of my life inscribed simpliciter no explanation. What is the power of the unexplained. There he was one day (new town) in a...
China was a surprise to Auden and Isherwood – it reminded them of Surrey. Faber had commissioned them to write a travel book about the Far East early in the summer of 1937. The Japanese...