‘What are we going to write about now?’ one of Ulster’s more engagé poets half-jokingly inquired soon after the IRA’s ceasefire was announced. One would imagine that...
As blank as scripture to a ruling class Discussed in hells they do not think exist, Cracked and abandoned to the slicing grass And disabusing dust, A movie...
When the painter died the people in her painting stiffened a little in their oils: my sister’s two friends from art school, dressing in her bedroom. An oval mirror caught in the arms of a...
About Auden’s Juvenilia He knew he would be great And told his tutor so But lots of second-rate Ramshackle lines ‘to go’ Like pizzas on a plate...
Towards the end of Radclyffe Hall’s The Unlit Lamp (1924), the heroine, Joan Ogden, who has grown miserably old in a small provincial town, overhears two young women discussing her. She...
If language speaks us, as Lacan claimed, and as Aron – the young protagonist of The Book of Intimate Grammar – senses intuitively, then our thoughts are trapped in hand-me-down forms...
Unbearably buoyant the night before My return to Blairs, I’d be brought back down To earth by Dad’s Polonius routine. He’d been there in the black and white Forties, And had to...
As one thinks of Harold Bloom, Auden’s description of Wyndham Lewis as a lonely old volcano comes to mind. Though not, like Lewis, ‘of the Right’, or indeed claiming any...
If I drummed on the long Dahomey tambour, I’d be bumbling, blind in ludicrous Western clothes, that tambour’s wooden tubes stepped at the foot like a half-closed sea captain’s...
Baroness James, making a rare visitation to a blighted metropolitan zone, downriver of Tower Bridge, has written a very useful book, a book on which I will be happy to draw for years to come....
What should a man famous for having wished the Author dead wish for himself once he becomes a dead author? To leave no trace behind would seem right. But if Roland Barthes was hostile to the...
To Umberto Eco for his 60th birthday run! Umberto riverrun: dagli apografi intercatattici alle filles goleuses: dai differipetizomi delle lettrici castrottiche e fabulose che godono solitarie...
Once regarded as among the most distinguished poets in England, admired by Johnson, envied by Goldsmith, praised by Wordsworth, and read by everyone, Anna Letitia Barbauld has this last century...
Angela Carter’s first novel, Shadow Dance, is a bold, leathery, coarse book. It summarises thinly its author’s later adventures and preoccupations, as the chapter headings in a...
In a little-known film of 1985 called Harem, a yuppie female stockbroker (Natassja Kinski) is drugged and kidnapped on the streets of New York, only to wake up in the harem of an enigmatic oil...
The hero of Irene Dische’s first novel was Adolf Hitler, alive and well and living in New Jersey. The hero of her second is Benedikt August Anton Cecil August Count Waller von Wallerstein....
In Palazzo Mocenigo where he lived alone Lord Byron used every grand room To watch solitude mirror by mirror And the beauty of doors no one passed through He heard the marine murmurs of silence...
The newspapers covering the trial in 1895 found it difficult to put the hideous words into print. Most hoped that those who needed to know would know enough already. Others assumed that a lacuna...