Driving through the September rain the taxi driver didn’t say a word until a goat ran across the road. He came to a sudden stop, banged his fist on the windscreen, and intimated we were...
There is a particular type of literary criticism – these days very rare – that aims to exist intensely as bravura performance, dramatic spectacle. It would be pointless to object that...
It is not very often that professional students of literature experience an invigorating shock of pleasure, surprise, illumination upon reading a work of criticism – perhaps because, like...
I completed my memoir World within World in 1950, when I was 41. Reading it now, 42 years later, it seems to me that much of it represents the situation of a generation of English writers during...
I woke to your knocking, convinced someone was patrolling the corridor, hammering the doors. The heat was intense, and I wished it would rain. Your name came to me, and I thought about all...
In childhood I thought of cows and dreams together Starting from Pharaoh’s dream of seven well-favoured kine Followed by seven other kine, lean-fleshed, That did eat them up. Joseph the...
‘What tends to emerge from the great novels of the 20th century is the idea of an open encyclopedia,’ wrote Calvino in 1985, the year of his death. Tracing the lineage of the...
Howard Rheingold, in his recent Virtual Reality, explained the idea of ‘cybersex’: how someday we will be able to don sensor suits, plug into the telecommunications network and...
Kurt Vonnegut will be 70 this year. At this age he would indeed be a remarkable writer if his latest book – which is a collection of occasional pieces in the vein of the earlier Wampeters...
Henry Green’s literary career began precociously and ended prematurely. According to his son Sebastian Yorke, the future novelist was already ‘writing hard’ at eleven or twelve,...
Esther Freud’s Hideous Kinky started its career with two disadvantages. One was the title: it suggests whimsy, from which the book is in fact bracingly free. The phrase is explained and has...
Last month Birnam Wood came to Putney Vale Crematorium. Or so it seemed. As the attenders at Angela Carter’s funeral emerged from the chapel, surrounding trees began to rearrange...
Doors on them now, the automobiles, the black Grandiose, or red, gold-lined Elegances: flashing along through London, Oxford, the blossoms and lanes. They stop at the wayside pubs and enthusiasts...
Anticipating our zigzag, as if somehow By information or low Cunning, she knew our speed And course, she contrived a need For company. She came at us From all angles, silently, without fuss, A...
Politesse A memory kissed my mind and its courtesy hurt me On an ancient immaculate lawn in an English county you declared love, but from politesse...
Recently in this journal C.K. Stead explained the dilemma of being a popular Australasian performer in England: ‘He can only be fully understood at home: but there he’s likely to...
Every poetic rebellion hardens sooner or later into an ossification of style and language and needs replacement by something at the time believed to be its opposite. In the 20th century it has...
Graham Swift’s new novel, like its two predecessors, is about a man who wants to reconstruct the past. In Waterland (1983) this enterprise was conducted – plausibly enough if rather...