The shame of being on the wrong side of history: this is what Kazuo Ishiguro’s first three novels have been about. It is not a condition that has been written about a great deal in English,...
Anyone who has ever taken the slightest interest in Shakespeare and his times owes a great deal to Edmond Malone. It was Malone who in a single month, June 1789, discovered not only the papers of...
Latin has always suffered from being in the shadow of its more glamorous Greek cousin. It is rarely allowed to stay up late for Dionysiac frenzies, sympotic sensuality or the frenetic cut and...
At a party given forty-odd years ago by the suddenly-famous Angus Wilson, Dwight Macdonald ‘introduced himself, American-style, to Rose Macaulay, describing himself as an editor of the
Moving away in the taxi, I could just see myself climbing the marble steps and stepping through the plate-glass into a lounge-cum-vestibule, its...
If you doubt, you can put your fingers In the holes where the oar-pegs went. If you doubt still, look past its deep mooring To the mountains that enfold the corrie’s Waterfall of lace...
Critics don’t think much of Joanna Trollope’s novels. They call them inconsequential, petty and suburban. But that’s beside the point, because as far as money and fame are...
For Matthew The ache in my leg seems worse, also that mole on my arm, swelling a bit I’m sure. I drift through the bookshop reading The Family Health Practitioner. I carry it round like a...
The ‘Viking’ is one of the strongest images in contemporary popular culture. As Régis Boyer remarks in his essay in Northern Antiquity on the French reception of Old Norse...
It would seem improper to begin a review of a biography by considering whether its subject was better described as ‘fair of face’ or‘ill-favoured’ if the subject were not...
In these columns six years ago, among a chorus of praise for the new, revised Oxford English Dictionary, OED2, Charlotte Brewer entered a dissenting opinion (3 August 1989): The riches stored in...
In the late Fifties, in the dusty warren of a Manhattan apartment, the composer Artur Sergeevich Lourié answered my questions about his friend Osip Mandelstam, whom he plausibly deemed to...
Pusher Angelus of mercy, Al was the Pope walking through the squalor of an unfeeling world – yes, sometimes, numbed by his stuff, he floated among the giddy children bestowing vials of...
To a person inquiring about his life, Emerson wrote: ‘I have no history, no fortunes that would make the smallest figure in a narrative. My course of life has been so routinary, that the...
There is something about a millennium, something about the clicking-over of zeros on the odometer of history that sends a frowsy doomsday swell welling up from under. Good round numbers beget...
Tim Winton’s new novel is full of shit. There are references to it every three or four pages, almost: characters are forever feeling like it, or smelling of it, or coming out with it, or at...
Like most biographies nowadays, David Nokes’s John Gay is very long, but unlike some of the others it is not much longer than it needed to be. Gay devoted so much of his attention to people...
The soppressata fée outside of Califano’s with the swept back ’do and blood on her smock grabs a quick smoke on the sidewalk, tosses it in the gutter then sucks back her lips...