Literary criticism seems to be putting on weight in its old age – Margaret Anne Doody’s book is well over three hundred thousand words and loaded with learning, which may appal the...
A purple-haired woman with a paper handkerchief for a face runs down the rue des Messageries. Between the perspective of buildings tall crane idle against the lines of morning and a doleful green...
Love of fat men. Ulli would like to go and see a film with this title. She would buy herself a fistful of Panda liquorice and a daytime ticket and sit there and watch it through again and again,...
The jacket photograph is revealing. A rather apologetic looking man, in sensible but unpretentious tropical attire, stands between two tremendously authentic indigenes, complete with bows and...
my father sleeps a half-sleep, half out of the world. As the surgeon pulls open his sternum, I’m waiting at a table in the corner of this bar in a city a thousand miles away. The moon pulls...
Just after I turned nine, my great-aunt Jennie died of cancer. At the funeral, her brother George felt a pain in his back and four months later we buried him....
In Irish poetry, from Ó Rathaille to the rebel songs, a paradigmatic encounter recurs. Up on a hill, or down by the glenside, the poet meets a woman who celebrates Ireland’s pastand...
I would, in fact, go so far as to say that Infinite Jest is one of the very few novels for which the phrase ‘not worth the paper it’s written on’ has real meaning in at least an ecological sense;...
It would be quite possible to read about Edward Thomas and wonder how it was that so many people made such allowances for him. A man who had a house built for himself and then refused to live in...
It might as well be gaslight now That soughs and pouches through the trees, Lost pockets of foxed sepia, The silver, pollen-haunted sneeze Of sunshine and magnesium Caught in the filter of her...
There was a scramble for mementos when the road across the border was smashed up, and there was no way in or out of this province of great lakes and mountains. High on a terraced garden, where...
This biography opens with a vivid chapter on Raymond Williams’s funeral. Entitled ‘Prologue, in Memoriam’, it transports the reader to Clodock Church, ‘a plain little...
‘It would be hard,’ Robert Frost wrote, ‘to gather biography from poems of mine except as they were all written by the same person, out of the same general region north of...
Yeats had no doubt how and when the fatal blow was struck. In his memoirs, he noted that ‘the condemnation of Wilde had brought ruin upon a whole movement in art and letters.’ Yeats...
I look at pictures of her and I just can’t see it. She’s elegant, composed, straight-backed. She’s in a tweedy suit on the beach, scowling at the sun, one hand in pocket, the...
In the days of F.R. Leavis, English literary criticism was wary of overseas, a place saddled with effete, Latinate languages without pith or vigour. Proust is relegated to a lofty footnote in...
In 1915, Ford Madox Hueffer became Ford Madox Ford – by deed poll. Around the same time, at the age of 41, he enlisted for active service in the British Army: ‘I have never felt such...
Under the floorboards Shadow and Smoke bark through these windy summer nights, always at queer intervals. Something’s got up their noses or call and response with a distant yard. All summer...