Across the double glazing, the full moon nudges a look-alike, its own spook satellite, in and out of watery cloud. A string quartet’s refined accents – andante cantabile – are...
For Gail and Zellman Warhaft and in memory of Sasha Warhaft 1985-1988 All I can hope is that the voice of Kavadias may be heard, however faintly, from the bridge on a dark night somewhere in...
It may be an accident of rereading that makes me want to put James Baldwin’s essays and novels together, to see The Fire Next Time and Giovanni’s Room, for example, as versions of...
If he had been writing in Petersburg in 1910 or thereabouts Philip Larkin would probably have been an Acmeist. He would have been in protest, that is to say, against the portentousness of the...
When Willie Hopkin first caught sight of D.H. Lawrence in his pram, he thought him a ‘puny, fragile little specimen’. Forty-four years later the fragile specimen died, reduced by...
Frank Budgen’s last pamphlet ‘Further Recollections of James Joyce’ (1955) carries a bit of personal reminiscence which looks as if it might be more important than most. He...
The small dacha in Peredelkino outside Moscow where Boris Pasternak lived for several years and where in 1960 he died is now a museum. It was there that the Writer’s Union representative...
The author of A Tenured Professor is not only a famous tenured professor of economics but, unlike many of the breed, an elegantly witty writer. From time to time he demonstrates his versatility...
I So what did you think with Katie on your knee as the plane turned in over the Harbour? That tame dolphins are not the same as piccolos; that as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be;...
His name modulated into that of a country, but he dreamed of uniting an entire continent. At one point he was president not only of Bolivia but also of what are now Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and...
No, I said, the title wasn’t sexist, I was thinking about the Russian cosmonauts who were stuck in orbit, and how they hooked up a British princess and an interpreter and got them to make...
In a cold October twilight, down towards An estuary beach of mud and stones, Three lifelong friends lurch and scramble over banks Of red soil, fallen from cliffs which one afternoon, Fifty years...
‘Beautifully written’ is novel-reviewer’s shorthand for ‘written by a woman’. So is ‘slim’. And ‘slender’. I began to note these casual...
Few discussions of literary obscurity fail to come to a climax with a story written by Kipling in the early 1900s, ‘Mrs Bathurst’. Conversely, most general critical treatments of the...
As befits an undisputed chef d’école, Stephen Greenblatt includes in this latest collection an account of his own ‘intellectual trajectory’, which features a decisive...
Yoshi, my visiting Japanese scholar, carried with him a little book of Everyday English Speech, out of which he was able to construct social uses ranging from the mildly unconventional to the...
Once upon a time, before the Channel Tunnel was built, there were two contemporary French novelists. Georges Perec died in 1982 at the age of 45, and nobody in England who was not a French...
In the Proceedings of the Royal Institute of Anthropophagy (last year’s Spring number, page 132), there is a most unusual instance recorded of a man and woman who conspired to eat each...