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...
In 1973, having finished a doctoral dissertation on Nabokov, Bobbie Ann Mason found herself compulsively rereading her favourite childhood books: series fiction about daring girl detectives,...
The Moor’s last sigh is several things, both inside and outside Salman Rushdie’s sprawling new novel. It is the defeated farewell of the last Moorish ruler in Spain, the Sultan...
Even by the standards of her contemporaries Margaret Oliphant’s productivity was phenomenal. As the author of 98 novels, she surpassed that other prodigious maker of fictions, Anthony...
After I had long nursed a faithIn the promise on which poetry has thrived –The recalled promise of languageAt its careful rising in mindsTo teach all, little by little,Until life and speech...
Slouched there in the Aston Martin On its abattoir of upholstery He escapes To the storming of the undersea missile silo, The satellite rescue, the hydrofoil That hits the beach, becoming a car...
Richard Ford’s narrator, Frank Bascombe, quit serious writing to become a sports-writer. This was the making of Ford. It wasn’t until he became Bascombe, the sportswriter, that Ford...
‘We were – and we knew we were – Cambridge – the essential Cambridge in spite of Cambridge.’ So F.R. Leavis in an exultant moment; and this biography for the most...
The lnfibulation Ceremony We have reached the limit of poetry: Western people’s ignorance of how their own cultures are viewed by integrationist Islam is too profound. The following poem...
Late July, hot and humid, I set out for Belfast via the small Shropshire town of Wem. Why Wem? Well, I’m working on a book about William Hazlitt, and feel the need to walk some of the...
Upstairs Last year I was going downstairs, now I’m going upstairs. Up there is a rocking horse in red velvet. I’ll dust him off with a crow’s wing, then I’ll shake the...
Edmund White has always struggled between appeasing the gods of his art and paying off the princelings of politics. Endearingly, and sometimes infuriatingly, he insists on doing both, and the...
‘All stories have in them the seed of all other stories: any story, if continued long enough, becomes other stories,’ declares a female hermit who is the Ur-storyteller in this Indian...