‘Are you making a trip here to write a book?’ inquires the manager as Paul Theroux books into a hotel in Corsica, 136 pages into his latest travel narrative. ‘I don’t...
No anthology offers us the full spectrum of Scottish poetry, but Roderick Watson’s comes closer than any other. This is the first big, general anthology to offer us work in Gaelic, Scots...
At college in my junior year, I had a nervous breakdown, or so I told Dr Coluccio in a long letter I typed at my desk in Eliot House. Anxious, exhausted,...
Hillary frowned impatiently. He’d go ahead with his own plans! Apricots, dates, biscuits and sardines: then he donned his three pairs of gloves. He stamped around muttering feeling his...
My great-grandfather’s watch did not confer immortality ... it was proof against age and against all those processes by which we are able to say that a man’s time runs out, but it...
‘The Janeites’ must be Kipling’s least popular story (though there is competition). Written in 1924 and published in Debits and Credits two years later, it is an abrupt, allusive...
The point of modern theatre is not ‘to hold the mirror up to nature’ but to shock, surprise and excite. (Shakespeare was a playwright from the accident of his time: his true talents...
For years – since boyhood, really – I’ve seen myself as an above-average soccer bore. At my peak, I would happily hold forth for hours about the rugged terrace-time I’d...
In the Thirties and early Forties the English poet David Gascoyne was much enamoured of the Continental, Late Romantic image of writing and of the writer as a visionary misfit. By the end of the...
Italo Calvino was born in 1923 and came to prominence in post-war Italy as a writer of neo-realist and politically committed short stories, some of them published in the Communist paper
He suffered fools grimly, because he thought there were so many of them, but he was himself far from grim. His laugh was a cross between a splutter and a chuckle, as if the joke had been cooking...
Something Audenesque for a conclusion? In dignified, indented, limestone lines? But in Wystan’s geology hills were permanent, Whereas human geography...
It was Wittgenstein’s objection to Freud and his Interpretation of Dreams that the procedure might be impressive, but why did interpretation have to end just there, what was to stop it...
A sort of overgrown phial, opaque blown glass of the sort we once saw them making at Murano, whitish – with blue? with yellow? And sticking out of it that odd trouvaille, a dried yard of...
The sustained parody of adult wooing in Lewis Carroll’s entertainments was part and parcel of that delighting delinquency that buoys the humour of both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass...
Jim Thompson never actually claimed to write capital-L Literature, but today, nearly twenty years after his death, many of his admirers are making the claim for him. Born in a sheriff’s...
This is an interesting, infuriating, brilliant, maddening book. In short, it is a work by Germaine Greer, who prefers (or so one sometimes thinks) anything to stagnation. The title is taken from...
Ned The three letters of his name suddenly resurrect him, lounging on some horizon, much like the long corpse of Christ in Michelangelo’s Deposition. There was something ideal about him:...