New York in August, and inside is the only place to be. The people around me, each at his own console, were watching their chosen moments in the history of American airtime. Elvis Presley’s...
A winter evening in Istanbul in the late Seventies. Political murders, disappearances and torture are daily events, and a military coup seems to be in the offing. Galip, a young lawyer whose...
Peering through bougainvillea that sits On their heads like mob caps, Monkeys set up advance posts. Soon, hands to ears, as if telephoning, They establish links, At pre-arranged signals swarming...
The present novel completes Pat Barker’s First World War trilogy. It ends just before the war itself ends, with the attempted crossing of the Sambre-Oise canal in which Wilfred Owen was...
A senior lecturer in English and American studies at one of our livelier universities, himself a fine poet, was talking to me on the telephone. A student had decided to write something about...
There are some curious aspects to Frank Lentricchia’s study of four Modernist poets: T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens. For a start, it’s a book about poets...
Writers are broadly classified as intellectuals, though many poets and novelists feel uncomfortable enough with the title. The split between analysis and imagination, the critical and the...
Charlotte Smith was the first English novelist to make a castle or great house into an emblem of the state. Before her, houses in novels provided appropriate settings or confined rebellious...
MotoringTom PaulinOr Charlus as McGahern would call youwhen we stacked up stories with Heaney– all fun a great geg pure pleasureI’d think of this village near Donegal town–...
When novelists tell us that the world is made of God’s love or the same green cheese as the moon, we expect them to dramatise their perception – to force their philosophy on us as a...
To read the letters of Dorothy Richardson is to become exhausted, vicariously, by the ‘non-stop housewifery’ which consumed her days. From 1918 until 1939, Richardson and her husband...
Isaac Babel was a middle-class Jew from Odessa who rode to war with a Cossack regiment. This extraordinary conjunction occurred during the Russo-Polish war of 1920. It is not news, because the...
Chronic Symbiosis These things can be arranged, he said. Besides, glitter has become reasonable again. Hadn’t you heard? For one irrational second I thought today’s subject was...
Poetry, it must be said, has become very finicky in our time. Housman thought it impossible to do, except that very occasionally it turned out to be there. Emily Dickinson would not have agreed...
I am the man in the pink hat Who catches everybody’s eye And is not really there. In the preparatory version My hat was dowdy, I was older. Now I am ‘Who is that good-looking...
John Sutherland’s pithy, cynical Life of Scott is very much a biography of our time: irreverent, streetwise, set foursquare in a ‘real world’ in which careers achieve money and...
‘Since the age of 15 poetry has been my ruling passion and I have never intentionally undertaken any task or formed any relationship that seemed inconsistent with poetic principles; which...
There are at least two words ‘poetry’, one meaning linguistic activity of a certain kind, the other meaning verbal matter produced by such activity. I speak in this little essay of...