They told him, with reassurance: ‘You must turn over a new leaf.’ Ever submissive and grateful, he did so and then said: ‘Look! This brings me to the last page in the book. And...
The author of ‘Naming of Parts’, probably the most anthologised English poem of the Second War, has too often been held to be that and that only. Like Julian Grenfell, author of...
There have always been novels with a highly developed sense of their own means of production. When, at the end of Mansfield Park, Jane Austen said she’d let other pens dwell on guilt and...
In February 1812, Byron stood up to speak for the first time in the House of Lords. His speech was a passionate defence of the Nottingham weavers – followers of the mythical King Ludd...
Little Blotter to her Master, and his Reply It is sad in the grave my master, my chosen Who fed me and stroked me and clicked on the fire, And though you tried to make me comfortable And laid me...
cut right through the house: a black wiggly line you could poke a finger into, a deep gash seeping fine black dust. It didn’t appear overnight. For a long time it was such a fine line we...
‘The rich are different from us.’ ‘Yes – they have more money.’ Though it is Hemingway’s riposte that sticks in the memory, Scott Fitzgerald’s belief in...
The heroine of Lucy Ellmann’s new novel is one of an increasingly rare breed in modern fiction – a virgin. Isabel is a thirty-something art history student, prim, gauche, improbably...
‘In all my dealings with the Moors, I have always discover’d in them an ill-natur’d cowardise, which makes them insupportably insolent, if you shew them the least respect, and...
The anthologist’s job is or ought to be a happy one. Less so the reviewer’s, especially if the reviewer is himself or herself an anthologist, and sick and tired of the standard ploys....
Seeing things, Seamus Heaney’s ninth volume of new poems, is aimed squarely at transcendence. The title has a humble and practical William Carlos Williams ring to it, but that is...
The American press is waging a campaign against American universities, assisted by a barrage of muckraking books. It would be naive or dishonest to claim that there are no follies or crying...
The first page of Jeremy Reed’s ‘autobiographical exploration of sexuality’ finds him with ‘a red gash of lipstick’ on his mouth, pondering whether to take the ten...
I was waiting outside my local 24hr Photoprint Services, all unsuspecting of the fate shuffling towards me on the mini-lab auto-printer. I was flicking through the usual haul of barely...
From the roof of her under-reef den a giant Pacific octopus – whose suckered legs are metres long, who changes tone when curious from glowing white to glorious red – hangs a hundred...
All day I have wiped paste inks From auxiliary rollers, ink ducts, Rubber stamps and the work top. Dabbing My fingers in trichloroethane. The cleaning solution is clear as water And smells like...
Julian Barnes is a writer of rare intelligence. He catches the detail of contemporary life with an uncanny, forensic skill. His style is a model of cool and precision. He is often very funny, and...
What Carlyle called the Condition of England Question – in our day, the country created by Thatcher and her sub-lieutenants – is surely the ripest subject on offer to novelists. The...