Although Bombay and Mumbai are the same city in reality, they are probably two different cities of the mind, or at any rate the names signify two phases in its history. Bombay was a colonial...
In 1616, the year in which Shakespeare died, Ben Jonson became the first English dramatist to publish a collected edition of his own plays. No doubt The Workes of Beniamin Jonson, a folio volume...
You need never explain yourself in the present tense. It is the most authoritative and least analytical tense in English, the stuff of dreams (the breakdown of cause and effect) and of...
(A version of Schubert’s ‘Klage an das Volk’) Youth of our Days, gone like the Days of our Youth! The People’s strength, unnumbered impotence, The Crowd’s gross...
Kenneth Koch ends his fine and amusing collection, One Train, with a sequence called ‘On Aesthetics’, which, amongst many other things, takes in the aesthetics of Paul Valéry,...
Sherlock Holmes tugging on his pipe in the fog-drenched London streets, Philip Marlowe swilling whiskey, waiting for the phone to release him from the solitude of his seedy office, Fitz –...
Something amazing has happened to Toni Morrison’s reputation in the United States. Over the last ten years, since the publication of Beloved, her fifth novel, she has been catapulted from...
Chinese Bridport Then the morning shadow falls, suddenly slanting down monstrous apartment blocks at Porte de Choisy and its Chinatown, over a piazza of pagoda-style kiosks. Diaspora money with...
God answers our prayers by refusing them. Luther I A Place by the Sea Because what we think of as home is a hazard to others, our shorelines edged with rocks and shallow sandbanks...
How aptly named: Grace Paley. For ‘grace’ is perhaps the most accurate, if somewhat poetic, term to employ in speaking of this gifted writer who has concentrated on short, spare...
‘His fiction, in its rather grim bravado, its humour, its morbidity, its wry but persistent hopefulness, matches the shape and tint of present America.’ This was John Updike in 1961,...
My boredom chock-a-block with furniture – the desk in bits, the sofa’s cushions cluttering the bed, drawers shoved beneath the dresser – I stare at Wimbledon while listening to...
Asked in 1933 what his favourite among his own poems was, Wallace Stevens said he liked best ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’, from Harmonium (1923). The work ‘wears a deliberately...
‘An obituary,’ Virginia Woolf wrote on Saturday, 6 January 1940. Humbert Wolfe. Once I shared a packet of choc creams with him at Eileen Power’s. An admirer sent them. This was...
Jack Rabbit Will I ever catch up, or will I be easily Caught first? It was assumed I’d branch out With the heretics, commit a few crimes, then Suffer the decreed punishment: instead, I...
Visiting Perth in May 1922, D.H. Lawrence struck one May Gawlor, who met him at a literary picnic, as a cross between ‘a reddish bearded able-bodied seaman and a handyman at the...
When Browning’s grammarian, grown old and bald and sick, was urged to get out of his cell and see a bit of life before he died, he replied that he still had work to do: ‘Grant I have...
When in the mid-Eighties I lived in the port of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, I lived in a city policed by gossip and run by rumour. While its citizens, flapping in white robes and black veils and...