‘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...
In the United States, bestselling works of what is now called literary fiction tend to be aggressively regional – think of Jane Smiley’s Iowa, Jane Hamilton’s Midwest or E....
A learned, indeed an erudite little book; but also one that is so absorbing, so readable, so quietly and deftly humorous, that it shows up all the dull pretentiousness of nine-tenths of the stuff...
In the early Sixties, when I was ten and first saw Tod Browning’s classic vampire film Dracula (1931) on television, I was impressed that the Count could walk past a mirror and cast no...
It was pride and nothing else made me lift my head from the spit and sawdust of The Prospect of Oblivion, on my cheek a dark naevus that married a knobby knot in the planking. How long I’d...
Any pushy, worldly man or woman of letters would like to find and befriend a Thomas Warton. The great 18th-century editor of Shakespeare, Edmond Malone, certainly recognised his usefulness....
We wouldn’t think of anything as a tragedy if we did not have a deeply ingrained sense of order already there to be affronted. Tragedy in life, and as art, exposes by violation our mostly...
The green and purple bergs of Scotland melt so slowly the millennia seem equal: on such a day Columba could have paddled here in his coracle. In such light airs you...
All his life he kept his distance. At readings and concerts he would notice a young man, gaze at him, make his presence felt and understood, and later, in the semi-privacy of his diaries, record...
In the old times, long before the birth of the Irish Free State, a young woman called Brigid McLaughlin went down from Derry to work in southern Donegal. Her job was to look after two children, a...
There are several different things one can be aiming at in a verse translation, leaving aside the genre known as ‘Imitation’, in which poets like Samuel Johnson, Ezra Pound and Robert...
What was T.S. Eliot’s favourite colour? Which season – summer, autumn, winter, spring – would you expect to feature most often in the works of Philip Larkin? And which of these...
Famous poems, like faces, are a particularly memorable kind of introduction to the person they conceal. Like other kinds of introduction, they are often what we remember a person for, or what we...