How can women come to a better understanding of their cultural situation? What needs to be changed, and why? The questions are as urgent as ever, despite wishful rumours to the contrary. Numerous...
Forests of the medieval world, that’s where her mind will wander the three dissertation years, lucky girl – Forest of Bleu, which crowded around the walls of Paris and stretched...
The titles of Desmond MacCarthy’s books must have seemed to him unassailably offhand – Remnants, Portraits, Experience: titles nicely in tune with his well-known view of himself as a...
Edith Wharton is known, among other things, as the teller of the most devastating of the anecdotes displaying Henry James’s incapacity to communicate efficiently. The story told in her 1933...
Rightly admired as a critic, an interpreter of ‘culture and society’, Raymond Williams was disappointing as a writer of fiction. The Eggs of the Eagle is the second volume of...
We bought raspberries in the market; but raspberries are discredited: they sag in their bag, fermenting into a froth of suspect juice. And strawberries are seriously compromised: a taint –...
The landscape of Ellen Douglas’s Mississippi is designed to keep us out, to resist recognition; and the lines of its knobs and bluffs and ridges may be deciphered only by those who have...
Brutal policy, like inferior art, knows whose fault it all is. Ariel Upward, cheeping, on huddling wings, these small brown mynas have gained a keener height than their kind ever sustained but...
Lying together marks the end (one hopes) of a sequence of novels D.M. Thomas began in 1983 with Ararat. Now called in its entirety ‘Russian Nights’, the sequence has been a fluid...
Post-War British Photograph Poetry Everyone screwing up their eyes as if they can’t quite make us out – Jim with his hair fully restored, Johnny with the Simoniz duster, polishing the...
What kind of actor? Well let’s just say you’d almost certainly know my face, but might not know my name. One evening, for example, on the way home from a performance (I’m...
Soliloquy ‘We die together though we live apart’ You say, not looking up at me, Not looking up....
Half a century after it was fought, the Second World War is still being written, and still being judged. The run of new fiction, like the current debate over war crimes trials, bears witness to...
Inevitably your biographer is getting it all wrong. His little screen recapitulates the few known facts. With rapidly dabbing fingertips he coaxes a workable pattern, till there it is – the...
‘Of all nations’, writes Ian Ousby, ‘we’, the English, have ‘perhaps the most strongly defined sense of national identity – so developed and so stylised, in...
Tim O’Brien, who fought in Vietnam in 1968, went on to write two fine books: the memoir, If I die in a combat zone (1973), and the novel, Going after Cacciato (1979). This latest work, a...
In the first place, let’s try to forget the word ‘experimental’, which has always been one of criticism’s more useless bits of terminology. There is really only one...
Men of different generations and presumably social worlds, Anthony Powell and Craig Raine aren’t much alike as writers. But the novelist’s Miscellaneous Verdicts and the poet’s