Once upon a time, authors were believed to improve their work in revision. Then editorial theory fell in love with first versions, stigmatising second thoughts as impositions. The old...
The poems in this volume will not persuade anyone to care for Shelley who does not do so already: they are often bad, sometimes dreadful, juvenile works which Shelley wrote between the ages of 17...
A woman at the counter of the newsagent I was in was charged £25. I looked over to see what she could have been buying. Twenty Benson and Hedges, a packet of crisps – and a clutch of...
Between 1938 and 1940, the Italian-American writer John Fante published three books. The first two – Wait until Spring, Bandini (1938) and Ask the Dust (1939) – were novels; the...
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...
I t 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...