In the lustrum after World War Two the word ‘commitment’ got almost as much work as ‘existential’ in literary magazines. The words represented opposite attitudes to the...
A last visit to the long-abandoned ‘Gosses’ on Harold Macmillan’s Birch Grove estate, soon to be levelled as part of the Birch Grove Golf Course. I apologise to the driver for...
Gregor von Rezzori was born on his mother’s estate in Bukovina in 1914. Bukovina was Austrian in those days, Romanian after the First World War, and Russian after the second. The Rezzoris...
Two cowboys in slouch hats and part of a (presumable) horse. ‘To me the window is still a symbolically loaded motif,’ drawled Cody. We are in Glen Baxter country, where the weekend...
Five foot eleven, twelve stone, sixty-three, I lie in the bath and look at the apple-tree And the apples dawdling into rubicundity To blend with the old brick wall’s well-weathered red....
All novels are historical novels, as my late teacher, Graham Hough, used to say; but some are more historical than others. Novelists can improve on history, and if they are Science Fiction...
At the beginning of the third volume of his autobiography, Elias Canetti is still in his twenties. He has been cooped up for a year in a bed-sitter on the outskirts of Vienna with only a print of...
A style suggested by a name, A way of comportment, of playing – In the merging of ‘line’ and ‘glint’ Necessary elusiveness, hint Of mother of pearl,...
In the introduction he wrote to the Magnus memoir of the Foreign Legion, D.H. Lawrence remarked that he hated ‘terrible’ things, ‘and the people to whom they happen.’ A...
Adrian Room has garnered umpteen dedications, and some of them are of interest, but what is the point of unrolling them alphabetically as something purporting to be a dictionary? Abbott opens,...
Hummingbirds don’t know the words.
Since its appearance in Germany in 1977, Klaus Theweleit’s psychoanalytical study of fascist literature has graduated from the status of a cult work to that of a classic. Rereading it in...
Olly has a new guest. Uninvited Tim entered his head, pushing his way, Intending to stay. Forty years I’ve known Olly. Who’s Tim? Tokyo spilt over the plains of China. As the sun set...
for Philip Hodgins As usual up the Giro mountain dozers were shifting the road about but the big blue ranges looked permanent and the stinging-trees held no hint of drought. All the high drill...
It is the great merit of the literature on ideas of ‘the double’ that asking questions about the mysteries of the Devil gets such good historical answers. From Tymms (1949) to Miller...
The thought did occur during the Eighties that it wouldn’t do to leave Rabbit Angstrom – Toyota dealer, wife-swapper, gone-to-seed athlete, conservative, citizen of Brewer,...
The poor man’s wife flourishes, the Sultana gets thinner and scrappier by the minute. So the Sultan sends for the poor man and demands the secret of his wife’s happiness. ‘Very...
Cuneiform studies have come far since 1872, when George Smith, assistant keeper in the Oriental Department of the British Museum, engrossed the December meeting of the Society of Biblical...