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:...
From the beginning of his distinguished career, with his influential The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Reality in American Literature, on to the more recent Adultery and the Novel and his fluently...
Among other certain things (death, taxes etc) is the rule that no work of science fiction will ever win the Booker Prize – not even the joke 1890s version. H.G. Wells’s The Time...
Many years ago, before soundbites and even before That Was the Week that Was, I found myself pushed by the late Brigid Brophy into taking part in an early TV quiz show. In those days such things...
You and I, when our days are done, must say Without exactly saying it, goodbye. If we could choose at such a time one free Embodiment which might, by being the last, Stand in the account somehow...
Henry James’s injunction to the novelist was ‘Dramatise! Dramatise!’ Ezra Pound advocated ‘the presentative method’. A dozen lesser but important voices have urged...
Proust said he didn’t understand how critics could divide literary works into good and bad patches, admiring the first half of a novel by Gautier but not the second, praising everything to...
In 1948 I was sitting in my college room trying to work when Kingsley Amis opened the door and looked in apologetically. We must have been conscripted at the same point in the war, but being...
On 20 October in Melbourne, I had the satisfaction, as one of the judges of the Victorian Premier’s Prize for First Fiction, of not giving the award to a young writer who has perpetrated...
Most astrophysicists could write a bad novel, whereas few novelists could rise to being even poor astrophysicists. Those who live in the world of letters have to suffer the humiliation of knowing...
Pound died in 1972; Auden, who was 22 years younger, in 1973. Both writers underwent the usual posthumous dip in attention and reputation. This familar dégringolade is a mysterious process, and...
‘Traduttore traditore,’ the translator is a betrayer. In other words, every translation is an act of treachery against the loved original, a stab in the back. If this Italian proverb...
Shot You sleep as I stumble room to room, unhelmed, heavy-greaved; coming to you through gorse-light and the fallen trees: heraldic, blessed with wounds. Red-handed at the key I was stock-still,...