The pensée that no woman has ever given more pleasure in bed than Agatha Christie, now mildly feline, is much too kind, we would have said in the early Sixties when trying to write crime...
A.D. Nuttall is among the most erudite contemporary academic literary critics, at ease with the Classics, much given to philosophy. He is also disconcertingly bold and curious, and his latest...
Doctor Zhivago The big stage and golden curtain, stars high up in the ceiling: one of the few films I think he would have seen. The sound of violins, then darkness about the wide, white screen. I...
Why do we enjoy tragedy? It may be thought that our best hope of answering this question lies in the psychology of Freud, who disclosed the dark side of the psyche. Behind this darkening of the...
Somewhere on the road between Twin Peaks and Faulkner country you might come across Pinckney Benedict hacking out a prickly little clearing for himself in the shadow of some of American...
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...