When Robert Stone’s best-known novel, Dog Soldiers, was published in 1974, there was a small but significant overlap of material with The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe’s...
Damon Runyon is famous for shunning the past tense, as in: ‘I am going to take you back a matter of four or five years ago to an August afternoon ... On this day I am talking about, the...
Two core propositions occupy the centre of Sir Kingsley’s fiction, and are doggedly reflected in his occasional journalism, his memoirs, his poetry and his conversation. Rendered as...
‘Last week, in another part of the city, a human head turned up.’ The severed head which opens Peter Conrad’s first novel suggests that contemporary fiction might be defined by...
‘All this takes place on a hilly island in the Mediterranean,’ Picasso said. ‘Like Crete. That’s where the minotaurs live, along the coast. They’re the rich
Down in the creek, snakes: Snakes in the opposite wood. There were snakes everywhere. This was new. This was good. At home in England, snakes Were pets you kept in a cage. Here they slipped free,...
‘Mexican literature will be great because it’s literature, not because it’s Mexican,’ yelled Angel in Carlos Fuentes’s magnificent dystopia, Christopher Unborn. We...
These five books continue in then very different ways the intense debate about the purpose of literary criticism and its relation to ‘theory’. Addressing Frank Kermode has its origin...
Here hedges used to move off thoughtfully, at an angle, like green sheep in single file, or seemed to. Now they really have, taking the grass as well, leaving the land stripped to the buff. What...
He saw the photo on the Sunday, started writing on the Monday how the dead Iraqi spoke like Palinurus or that bloke in ‘Strange Meeting’: you’ll have read before about the...
Within the first half-page of Toni Morrison’s novel, an 18-year-old girl has been shot dead by her middle-aged lover, and his wife has been manhandled from the funeral after attempting to...
As a boy I had no inclination to follow the yellow brick road, arm in arm with the Tin Man and the Scarecrow and the Cowardly Lion; warlocks and Munchkins were nothing to me, swaddled in the...
Fecund and jocund, well-earned and learnèd, wittily wily, But I digress is a delight and a treasure-house, alive with moving illumination and with benign warning, in short a delight-house of...
Early Morning Swim Every year now you make your face a little fainter in its vellum photo-frame, as if you were washing off your make-up with a towel and catching the last train home. You have...
Martin Stannard resisted the temptation to call this story Decline and Fall, but it would not have been a bad title. On one level, the last 27 years of Evelyn Waugh’s life make melancholy...
The frights the news brings – from child abuse to acid rain – prepare the mind for fictional scares. Carl Hiaasen’s comic thrillers deal with crimes against the planet. He puts...
A few hours before the Washington Redskins consummately humiliated the Buffalo Bills in the 1992 Superbowl, I unfortunately asked a fellow American, an editor who has lived in Paris for ten...
To arrive in Cambridge to study English literature with F.R. Leavis in the mid-Thirties was an act, on my part, of unconsciously astute timing. Since coming to Downing in 1932 as Director of...