Not only one of the (many) unread classics, Don Quixote is a book almost no one seems to have any intention of reading. People don’t feel bad about ignoring it, don’t need to pretend...
‘It is obviously the same person.’ The words of Lady Bracknell, one of the wisest characters in English literature, may eventually be echoed by readers when and if they have worked...
This is Heinrich Böll’s apprentice novel, written between 1949 and 1951. Since Friedrich Middelhauve, who published his stories, was unwilling to bring out the novel, Böll put it...
Pop music in Britain is almost forty years old. By 1957 ‘Rock around the Clock’ had opened a generation gap, London-based record labels like EMI, Decca and Pye had started to refine...
Never filmed, he was photographed only once, Looking up startled into the death-trap flash Like a threatened life-form. Still underlining his copybook one-word message With the flourish that...
Badger After the midnight crash of bins, Our neighbour’s dog barking And our neighbour shouting I remembered the hedgehog We found last month Unzipped in the long grass. Otter If I were to...
Cornucopia It lies on his thigh, dribbling, dead to the world. She kisses him, she’s not finished yet; she squeezes the limp flesh like a pastry cook between her fingers. He groans....
When Bookering last year I found most of the novels fitted into one of two categories, which I began to think of as ‘Conscious Modern’ and ‘Pattern Naive’. Pattern Naive,...
Barnes’s poems prompt no new questions about poetry, and no new convictions about it. The hoariest truths about poetry will always be new and questionable to some people, especially those...
Anything can be forgotten, become regular As newspapers hurled in a spinning are to land With a thump on the porch where Grandma sits And knits, her hound dog yawning at her feet. And other...
A publisher’s note explains that when William Golding died he had written two drafts of this novel, and was about to begin a third. The signs are that this might have been longer than the...
In a recent radio programme, Simon Armitage and Glyn Maxwell, two of the most prominent of the New Generation poets, retraced the journey undertaken by Auden and MacNeice in Letters From Iceland...
Everyone knows that as a young English Jacobin Wordsworth visited France, becoming so intimately entangled in Revolutionary affairs that he might have remained there, eventually to be destroyed...
Reading through Carol Ann Duffy’s unremarkable early pamphlet publications, one despairs of finding any sign of promise, any sign that this romantic and dreamy adolescent (‘Cast off...
An Education For James, again At the old Tramontana on Tottenham Court Road among the hi-fi shops I learned to order what you ordered, not studenty noodles but sophisticated things like the...
Between 1865 and 1871 Dostoevsky wrote three of the world’s greatest novels, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Possessed – and two remarkable novellas, The Gambler and The...
In the days following the disastrous South Vietnamese incursion into Laos in early 1971, the people of Saigon became increasingly anxious. The ghosts of the thousands of unrecovered dead, it was...
Loved and loathed, Patrick White loomed over Australian literature for decades as a distant, grimacing colossus. There was simply no way around him, no way he could not be taken into...