American culture has a special attachment to boys’ coming-of-age stories, and from Tom Sawyer to Summer of ’42 readily invests them with mythic import. But girls’ coming-of-age...
Tyniec A Benedictine abbey, the S of a river Feathered by willows. The rural life Placed on a platter, barns, A church spire, cottages. A farmer drives his cattle Over water-meadows, geese on a...
Which famous Victorian poet-painter was the 20th child of a dodgy stockbroker? Yes, it was the man in the runcible hat, Edward Lear. His latest biographer, Peter Levi, confides to us that, like...
The open window admits her body. Soapy water still circles the shape of her rough...
In memory of Cecil Torr It is hard to believe that he lived till the rise of the Nazis And the General Strike and nine or ten Armistice Days And that I was a child putting flowers on my...
The first draft of The Madness of King George (then called The Madness of George III) was prefaced with this note: The Windsor Castle in which much of the action takes place is the castle before...
At the age of 48, after thirty years of lecturing on German literature and writing radio plays, Gert Hofmann began to produce disconcerting novels. Michael Hofmann, his son, the poet, confronted...
Like his elder contemporary Henry James, Eça de Queirós belongs to the small and distinguished group of 19th-century novelists who wrote in exile. He was born in 1845 in a remote...
It’s always surreal arriving at the annual four-day meeting of the Modern Language Association. You land at a distant airport, check into a strange hotel, and there in the lobby are all the...
Slugging it out with Diana Trilling in the pages of Commentary, Robert Lowell remarked: ‘Controversy is bad for the mind and worse for the heart.’ Mrs Trilling, for all the world like...
Now translated in full from the French for the first time, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa is a great literary, as well as a great bibliographical, curiosity. Its author, Count Jan Potocki, who...
In the title story of Edward Upward’s new collection, a forgotten Marxist author of the Thirties dreams that he is approached by a present-day admirer, a ‘lecturer at a Yorkshire...
This must be a brave letter. No exotic quotations; no miserable, ignominious echoes of Swinburne, no trace of silvery, erotic decadence; no Musset; no motif of Delius – nothing but lucidity...
After the flood, among the bogs and swamps that were spread out to dry like linen, the animals appeared, some familiar, some entirely unknown; it was like the banks of the Nile when the river...
Mr Exocet She dreamed he made a scape ship from a grandfather clock, bone soap, and the certainty that human’ll breed true. Refuse the transhuman, he’d thunder in his sleep to the...
In a letter dated 22 January 1934 to his protégé James Laughlin, Pound makes passing reference to R.P. Blackmur, who had written a long unflattering essay, ‘Masks of Ezra...
‘And so,’ Bréhal said, ‘love would be time become available to the senses.’ Julia Kristeva, Les Samouraïs The genuine charm and considerable strength of Julia...
Perhaps only new countries can have a real past, peopled with genuine ghosts and filled with authentic records. Or it is countries other than one’s own that are so endowed? Any place that...