‘Shakespeare’s a good psychologist,’ I’d said – a casual remark, post-mortemised by the historian I was talking to. ‘He couldn’t be –...
Whole systems of thought have been founded on the French language’s inability to distinguish differing from deferring. Perhaps Napoleon is to blame (‘Not tonight, Josephine’)....
Trollope is our most popular and reprinted Victorian novelist. His new companions in the Abbey – Dickens, George Eliot and Hardy – may sell more copies of individual novels, but they...
Act Three, Scene Three of Julius Caesar ends with the murder of a poet. It begins with a stage direction: Enter Cinna the poet, and after him the Plebeians. This direction creates two...
In other years I would say, how pretty they are, The cherries outside our house. This autumn I see the first leaves Writhe from the green into the yellow and From the yellow into what seems a...
The war was finished – and so was the regime of occupation. Its most hated representatives had either fled or wound up in prison while their victims had been proclaimed martyrs. But all...
At Christmas our father took us to his church, The Catholic, though he only went there then, When he thought we ought to see the famous crib, Its painted figures of animals and people. I felt at...
Conrad enthusiasts subdivide into two categories. Both are convinced that so peculiar and haunting are his life and work, so utterly without precedents or successful emulators, that only an...
There are rich pickings still to be had in the jungle of literature, where dead authors half-buried in brambles continue to yield abundant fruit. Hardly had the sequel to Gone with the Wind been...
A Jane Austen of today is barely imaginable: but it one nonetheless imagines her, and locates her in South Africa, how would she be exercising her art? Could she find any subject other than the...
This is a collection of 14 stories by Mary Butts, a dedicated and prolific writer who died comparatively young in the Thirties. She is one of the current victims of the fashionable drive to...
The traditional self-contained, sensibly-proportioned novel, still very much the dominant influence on today’s literary scene, is called gently into question by each of these writers. Carey...
Think what a terrible waste nailed by the bed Of a spitting hag, bride long ago, once fat, Or pinned next to a feather on her greasy hat This flat, black, sun-dried, and, through lack of a...
It was the foible of the heroes of Italo Svevo’s novels to wake up each morning believing that, through their own striving, some splendid vita nuova might have begun and they might at last...
Henry Reed was a sad man but a funny man, and his poems are funny or sad – often, as in the celebrated ‘Lessons of the War’, both at once. I first met him in 1965, in the office...
Barbara Hepworth used to do my hair. I was a weekend Ted in those days and Miz H could shape a mean Pompadour. She liked to get a sort of surfer’s tunnel through the front. Trough of the...
Some readers do not much like Margaret Drabble’s later novels because they are so different from her earlier successes. She may have lost one public and not as yet entirely won over...
To look again at The Shores of Light, Edmund Wilson’s collection of his reviews in the Twenties and Thirties, is to marvel at his ability to discern, analyse and assess the American talents...