Last September, at the very moment when hundreds of thousands of teenagers began to follow the first GCSE courses under the National Curriculum, the Education Minister John Patten infuriated the...
Helen Garner’s Cosmo Cosmolino contains two short stories together with the novella that gives the book its title. There are connections between the three. Ursula, a friend of the unnamed...
Just under forty years ago David Erdman provided for William Blake historical contexts in abundance in Blake: Prophet against Empire (1954). It was a remarkable work of literary detection, which...
The excitable, exuberant surface of Mark Ford’s poems makes them instantly attractive. They speak with a bewildered urgency: See, no hands! she cried Sailing down the turnpike, And flapped...
The air was full of Gitane Filtre, her reflection transformed by the spray that lifts from torrents, the wardrobe-door open, her clothes pristine. Some were in polythene, preserved in the mist...
Readers making their way through Michael Bracewell’s latest novel may gradually become aware of a small but persistent ache: it comes of the author nudging them in the ribs. There is no...
Chaucer’s life is a standing temptation to a biographer. On the one hand, we have the 493 documented mentions of him brought together in the Crow and Olson Life Records, a body of paper...
It is difficult to talk sensibly about literary forgery when one has to call it that. The term carries heavy legal baggage. Criminal forgery – in the form of counterfeit money or altered...
No one ever failed more completely to be the hero of his own life than the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, for whom heroism was an obsession. He used his own head as a model for Christ, Solomon,...
Paul Auster is an amphibious writer whose eclectic methods and influences make one unsure by which end to try and grasp him. His early self-exile to an apprenticeship in Paris as a poet and...
In the Phrygian hills an oak tree grows beside a lime tree And a low wall encloses them. Not far away lies bogland. I have seen the spot myself. It should convince you – If you need to be...
Grey cloud roof sliding backwards lifts blue sky into the notch between hill-lines green au gratin. Pom-pommed, the slopes barge trees into valley turbulence. Along the summits, sunlit topknots....
Why did Susan Sontag write this book? Essayist and cultural critic, interpreter of Aids, cancer, the cinema, Fascism and pornography, recipient of Jonathan Miller’s burdensome accolade...
Jenefer Shute’s Life-Size comes garnished with a quote from Fay Weldon, in which enthusiasm has got the better of taste: ‘Terrific! I devoured it at a sitting.’...
She was born round the corner in an attic. Balancing chemistry textbooks on her feet, her father pushed the ivory five-foot pram down the middle. ‘He thought you were immortal’ says...
In my experience the dreams that are recovered (most are lost) fall into two categories – the majority, which are pedestrian and seldom interesting, and the few which are so different from...
The lights come up, the stage is bare, the audience goes on sitting there, row upon row of gleaming teeth, set in expressions of dutiful mirth for something they have now forgotten. Someone has...
Simenon was not a man to do things by halves. He moved house 33 times, wrote 193 novels under his own name and more than two hundred under 18 pseudonyms, produced 27 volumes of autobiography and...