‘In later life I have been sometimes praised, sometimes mocked, for my way of pointing out the mythical elements that seem to me to underlie our apparently ordinary lives.’ Dunstan...
When the two youngest Elliots, not yet in their teens, were sent to school at Stoer, they lodged, like the unmarried minister, near the kirk, with old Mrs Mackenzie and her daughters in a house...
1 Incline to me, MacDiarmid, out of Shetland, Stone-eyed from stone-gazing, sobered up And thrawn. Not the old vigilante Of the chimney corner, having us on, Setting us off, the drinkers’...
yi surta keep trynti avoid it thats thi difficult bitty it jist no keep findn yirsell sitn wotchn thi telly ur lookn oot thi windy that wey yi say christ a could go a roll n egg ur whuts thi time...
A useful maxim for reviewers would be one that encouraged them to relate art to life rather than art to art, or fiction to fiction. In two respects, unfortunately, Fatherland by Robert Harris...
At the outset of his long literary career, Rudyard Kipling was apparently content to recognise the distinction between verse and poetry, and, if we are to judge from his letter to Caroline Taylor...
The Intelligencer was a periodical mainly but not exclusively of Irish interest. It ran to 19 more or less weekly numbers between May and December 1728, with a longish interruption in the summer,...
Corinth, between two seas, the eye of the world. Timoleon, called Timo, son of Timodemos, younger brother of Timophanes. Timo growing up, butt of Timophanes the violent. ‘Violence? How else...
It can sometimes seem that the Second World War never stopped. Stephen Spender alluded recently in the London Review to the idea that it was simply a continuation of the First, but the...
At the end of Curriculum Vitae, Muriel Spark has just published her first novel, The Comforters. It is 1957 and she is 39 years old. After happening on Spark’s novel in proof while working...
It might seem a rather obvious point to make at the outset, but two of these novels are extremely long. Long novels make specific demands on our patience and attention, and in the end this can...
When Henry James’s play, Guy Domville, was booed off the London stage, the embarrassed author remarked that at least some of the audience was clapping. These approvers were powerless to...
The first collection from the West Coast poet Fred Voss takes its title from the mythical aircraft company which is an amalgam of all the Californian machine shops that Voss has sweated in for...
The topic of national self-regard falls under the general historical heading of ‘exceptionalism’ – where claims are made as to the unique quality of national experience, or...
He was an economist so he...
Peter Ackroyd’s new novel is partly a narrative, partly a series of rhapsodies and meditations on the nature of English culture, written in the styles of various great authors. It is an...
The worst of being dubbed Laureate today would not be the task of composing poems for royal and public occasions, but trying to make them sound like oneself, or even more so. Auden had no...
E.T. looked like my cousin, Who looked like many things wise And wonderful: certain dreams, Ancient jars in museums, Fetishes with level eyes And their native soil still on. I was a child. I...