Juliet Barker’s The Brontës is an uneasy work. It seeks to defend the family it takes as its subject against those who sought to invade its privacy: the Victorian reading public, with...
Jayne Anne Phillips’s first novel of more than a decade ago, Machine Dreams, reconstructed the history of three generations of a single middle-class, small-town American family over the...
Personal identity, according to Locke, is a creation of memory. The American writer Tobias Wolff has already published one volume of memoirs. Now, at the age of 49, he has produced a second. Who...
Mr Sharp gets out of the taxi. He doesn’t smoke but lights his pipe. His various friends walk up and down. ‘And this? What do you call this?’ says the driver. ‘In the land...
In 1978, at a seminar on John Maynard Keynes held by the University of Kent, Raymond Williams talked about ‘The Significance of Bloomsbury as a Social and Cultural Group’. He accepted...
Pauline Kael used to write witheringly about musicals said to appeal to people who didn’t like musicals, and we might feel the same about poems for people who don’t like poems....
His friends used to say that Cyril Connolly had been sent into the world for one purpose: to be talked about. He was an object of fascination to everyone who knew him. It was not exactly that he...
On 24 January, a Tuesday, Mr Cedric Brown, chief executive of British Gas, testified before the House of Commons Committee on Employment on the subject of his pay, which is £475,000 a year....
The North Country is the burial ground for America’s myths. So maybe it’s not surprising that there are more good writers per square mile in Montana and Idaho than anywhere else in...
Azhar’s mother led him to the front of the lower deck, sat him down with his satchel, hurried back to the bus stop to retrieve her shopping, and took her place beside him. As the bus...
Hyndford Street is a brick-built working-class row looking like hundreds of others. Yet it is to this terrain that the almost unbearable nostalgia of Van Morrison’s music always returns....
Who would have thought it? Little Women is on the American bestseller list again, with the name ‘Winona Ryder’ over the title instead of Louisa May Alcott, as if she had written the...
All Right I’m lying awake somewhere between the double yellow light of the Dimplex thermostat and the winking eye of the fax, making the journey across town, past all the stations in North...
We all know what a Euro-novel is. It’s clever and shallow, full of allusions to fashionable figures, and elaborately interested in its own making. The home product, by contrast, is solid...
Women of my age, born in the early Fifties and now in our forties, have reached the season of retrospection. We have become – or have not become – wives, wage-earners, mothers,...
The final section of Paul Bowles’s most famous novel, The Sheltering Sky, is prefaced by a quotation from Kafka that encapsulates the narrative trajectory of just about everything Bowles...
Why did Louis MacNeice have to wait thirty years for a biography? He died comparatively young – aged 55 – and was outlived by almost everyone he knew: wives, girlfriends, classmates,...
You were dozing over Uttar Pradesh well after the shadows of Annapurna swept across the big plane’s starboard wing, dreaming a peevish little dream of Stinky Phil, your playground tormentor...