Does anyone still think Shakespeare’s comedies provide happy endings for their heroines? Come to that, does anyone still think Shakespeare’s comedies have either ‘happy...
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) is known to us as the author of travel writings, witty poems and remarkable letters. If it were not for Isobel Grundy’s diligent work in the archives,...
Nothing in me wants to believe – nothing in the book makes me want to believe – that The End of the Story is a performance, but just for that reason I have to begin by saying what a...
In their Introduction to the Picador Book of the New Gothic, Patrick McGrath and Bradford Morrow proposed a familiar kind of progress myth to help us find our way around the New Gothic; the old,...
When Emerson wrote to Whitman that there must have been ‘a long foreground’ preceding the composition of Leaves of Grass, he expressed the curiosity every reader feels when coming upon...
A man in a Thurber cartoon asks a woman: ‘But Myra, what do you want to be enigmatic for?’ Or words to that effect. The question kept coming into my head as I read Beryl...
Volumes of short stories do not get into the bestseller lists, but Georgina Hammick’s first collection. People for Lunch (1987), did so at once. It can hardly have been the subject-matter:...
Martha Nussbaum is a classical scholar and moral philosopher who in several books and a great many essays has advanced a thesis about the cognitive power of emotions. Feeling, she says, is part...
Can there be literature after reunification? It strikes one as something of a science fictional question. Philip K. Dick, indeed, posited a future world in which the Axis powers had won World War...
The author, now about forty, has long since shown how easy he finds it to be a success in the world. As magazine editor, television producer, businessman, he has made money without great effort....
A sound cento for the fiftieth anniversary of Radio Three I married a tinker’s daughterin the town of Skibbereenbut at last one day she galloped awaywith me only shirt in a paper bagto the...
My Wives I descend on Holborn’s escalator watching my wives pass by on the opposite side, smiling, waving at me; they shout in Swedish, Russian, Urdu, that they’ll always love me. Even...
‘We were the last romantics,’ Yeats said, but he spoke too soon. We might feel the same about the situation proposed by the title of Mario Puzo’s new novel, now sitting...
‘The Romantic awakening dates from the production of Ossian,’ Ezra Pound wrote, and he was right. One of James Macpherson’s great contributions to literature was the use of the...
SWEENY: Ah! Now the gallows trap has opened that drops the strongest to the ground! LYNCHSEACHAN: Sweeney, now you are in my hands, I can heal these father’s wounds: your family has fed...
Colm Tóibín’s frustrating new novel starts from a pleasingly skewed perspective: its narrator Richard Garay (less often, Ricardo) was brought up in Buenos Aires, child of an...
Melville began writing Pierre, or The Ambiguities in August 1851; he had just turned 33 and was already the author of six books. The most recent of these, Moby-Dick, was about to be published, and...
A Picnic on Ice For Tom Lynch Let’s go back to Mullett Lake in March and have a picnic on the ice. Let’s wrap up like Inuits, and meet three miles north of Indian River, where the...