The condition (cancer) and the person (myself) Reeled towards each other over the years, Capsules slowly converging. Now they have docked – ‘Raped!’ the Soviet spacemen used to...
Laetitia Pilkington has been remembered chiefly as a source of information about Swift. In their happier days, she and her husband were friendly with Swift, whom it was in their interest to...
This is the 22nd volume in the series Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture. All the contributors are American, as are the General Editor, Stephen Orgel, and three out of five...
Recently I was teaching a poem by Yeats that has always reminded me of a stretched sonnet. ‘In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz’ has an octave of 20 lines and a sestet of...
I Repeat this experience wilfully. Instruct this experience to repeat itself. II With or without vicarious detail for all verities of this place. Me too. III Plenty of that already. Kikuyu grass...
With New Year (anxiety of New Years past, dread of New Years future) breathing hot down my neck, and time itself moving along so fast that it seems to be about to lap me, Oxford University Press...
So I’m moving between rooms with a tray, advertising McEwan’s, the kind we took sledging those distant snow-bright afternoons – or funereal lacquer, with peonies, or that...
Gilbert Adair the critic writes with feeling and practised bitterness about the anxiety of influence – ‘that looming, lowering pressure exerted, wilfully or not, by those who have...
English fiction since the war has been a house of good intentions. Inside it are thick theories and slender fulfilments. English novelists solemnise, in commentary about the novel, the qualities...
The voice leaves his throat like a spirit leaving a body. Words deep and English, pronouncing punctuation: comma, stop, line break. Words not in the poem, but needed. I’ve put a pound into...
Hamlet calls death the ‘undiscovered country’, but perhaps the deftness of that description masks a fatal insouciance. True, it isn’t really possible for us to...
Paul Auster is so implicated in his own fictions that it is often hard to tell whether his covert appearances there represent a Modernist textual teasing or a baser vanity; whether his walk-on...
At 10 – let’s be specific – at 10 a.m. you’d be sitting in your deckchair filling pages with shorthand so I imagine a caption in the News Chronicle GBS TRAVELS P&O...
Kurt Vonnegut’s latest book, and, according to its author, his last, is almost impossible to appreciate without extensive knowledge of his previous work. As far as I can tell, this is...
They call him Mister Bombastic: ‘Because he is well capable of rhetoric and flourish, he too often allows these two-edged gifts to deflect him from a real, vivid self into a bombastic...
Fintan O’Toole’s publishers announce that Richard Brinsley Sheridan has been generally ill-served by biographers, ‘who rehash the familiar outlines of his story every decade or...
A World Fit to Live in With his ‘shopping list’, my son makes us stop At choice hedges, a particular weed. He does not share my anticipation. In the long shadows, a man tends a grave...
‘Maybe this is a detective story,’ a character thinks in John Edgar Wideman’s novel Philadelphia Fire (1990). It’s a reasonable suspicion, and would be for anyone in any...