There are up to ten thousand American academics who could claim the job description ‘literary critic’ as they make their way to the annual convention of the Modern Languages...
Emily’s fans were once legion, and as reverential as mystics or poets. Indeed many were poets, like Robert Bridges, who sang that she had ‘all passion’s splendour’....
Looked at in one way, Madoc – A Mystery is an extraordinary and unpredictable departure, a book of poems the size of many novels, with a title poem nigh on two hundred and fifty pages long,...
This is a very good biography indeed – thorough, compassionate, refreshingly unreverential. Is it, on the other hand, necessary? Any literary biographer must proceed on the assumption that...
Lady Macbeth had no children of course. She was haunted by blood. She could find no relief from it. Month After month. Perhaps when it first started She sat down in a little yellow attic room...
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...