Cyril Connolly is famous now, and was famous in his lifetime, for not having written a masterpiece. A peculiar sort of fame: after all, many thousands of literary persons share the same...
The speechless quality of music is much envied and imitated. Spoken language follows in music’s wake, verbalisation a poor second best. The musical metaphors of Romanticism are steeped in...
Now the dead button does not stick, Where should we put it? The rock face We hit, propellers feathering, off the map, Provided our skeletons, but first Sorrow, deep, no news, a lacuna cut out In...
The School for Visionaries The teacher sits with eyes closed. When you play chess alone, it’s always your move. I’m in the last row with a firefly...
Michèle Roberts’s sensual saints are so bloodthirsty that I wonder whether the heroine seduces her visitor or eats him.
The only book about Albania I had read before this one was Edith Durham’s deadpan account of her travels there before the First World War. It is called In High Albania and describes how she...
This enormous volume – beautifully designed, bound and typeset by its publishers – represents the merest sliver of Mavis Gallant’s lifelong achievement. Even discounting the two...
Under the North Sea, a mile off Elie Where once she was noticed in a mullioned window, White lace cap rising, brooding over her table, Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant Translates onto starfish...
Sumatran Watching him handle his life as a flame-thrower on pilgrimage for a key geological event – say, volcanic eruption in snow, the frozen cocaine of church bells giving out under ice...
‘Dares to be intellectual,’ breathed the Guardian’s review of Patricia Duncker’s first novel, Hallucinating Foucault. But co-opting the defenceless Michel Foucault into a...
The two most interesting letters in this selection are not by Meredith: a fact suggestive of the Meredithian tendency to evade evidence or embodiment of a personal sort, and disappear into the...
Here’s a handy Arcadia, let’s go in. Rich loamy smell, heavy fronds – I’ll hold this one up while you bend through. Frangula siliquastrum – fissured trunk, glossy...
In 1955, the Daily Express conducted a poll to discover the most popular celebrities according to highbrow, middlebrow and lowbrow tastes. Raymond Chandler and Marilyn Monroe were, as Chandler...
The famous poet’s mistress, forty years ago, Now heard five times a week on radio Acting an ageing upper-class virago. ‘The deadbeats of the Caves de France, the suicidal’, The...
In his first Father Brown story, ‘The Blue Cross’, published in 1910, G.K. Chesterton introduced a ‘colossus of crime’ who seemed to have strayed in from Comic Cuts: a...
A young woman is shaken in her understanding of who she is and what she wants. The walking holiday she and her husband have planned now seems, Ian McEwan says, ‘a pointless detour from her...
Left-wing utopias which dream of a society beyond privilege are instances of the privileges they disown: as Oscar Wilde knew, there is something offensively idle and frivolous about thinking up other worlds,...
Ever since the very brutal extraction of all four of my wisdom teeth, I’ve found myself talking with another man’s mouth, so to speak, and my tongue has become a mollusc such as an...