When the great German archaeologist Schliemann exclaimed (if indeed he did so), ‘I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon!’ he was not uttering a lie, nor was he being economical with...
‘It is against the nature of things that a woman who has given herself up to unnatural and inordinate practices ... should be able to write in perfect obedience to the laws of vocal...
Irina Ratushinskaya was 28 when she was arrested on her way to work on an apple farm and sent to the Small Zone section of a Mordavian labour camp. She was imprisoned on account of her poetry (or...
Ever since 1958, when his play The Birthday Party opened in London, Harold Pinter has been admired by the judicious for the witty realism of his dialogue and the engrossing mystery of his...
Blow Jobs You’d get more protein from the average egg; the taste’s a tepid, watery nothingness – skimmed milk? weak coffee? puréed cucumber? Fellation’s not a...
Autobiography is an art of reticence as well as revelation. But the 20th century, reacting against supposed Victorian prudery, takes its cues from Rousseau and Freud to urge ‘frankness as...
Frank Kermode belongs to no sect of literary criticism, and he has founded no school. Like William Empson, whom he praises as a ‘genius’ of criticism, Kermode has always been more...
The Age of Steam Remember porters? Weatherbeaten old boys with watery blue eyes who were never around when you wanted them? You had to find one before you could go anywhere in 1953. It was part...
Seminar on Contemporary Chinese Writing Novels about peasants are generally good (In general the peasantry is good) They may sound rather boring But they are not One of them is entitled...
Whether in person or in print, self-consciousness is unsettling. Self-conscious writers, like self-conscious speakers, can’t help betraying that they’re more concerned with their...
for Ted Hughes Years and years ago, these sounds took sides: On the left bank a green silk tapered cast Went whispering through the air, saying hush And lush, entirely free, no matter whether It...
The Queen of Portugal has gone mad. Her madness consists of thinking herself in heaven. But heaven is below what she expected. She wanders around muttering, ‘Hmph!’ Hugo, Things...
Jane Austen’s work seems, at first, hospitable to that literary parasite, pastiche: there isn’t much of it, so ersatz continuations or alternative narratives must satisfy the hunger...
No doubt it would be possible to apply to this exercise in magic irrealism the terminology of V. Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale, by way of demonstrating that Salman Rushdie’s...
What sort of a poet is Donald Davie? The factual answer, as with all poets, is to be found only in a volume such as the Collected Poems which he now lays before the public, but Davie himself...
In the manner of old Hollywood movies, biographies like to open at a terminal point and then flash back to the start of things. It is a device that stakes out the territory while creating a sense...
In his new novel William Boyd returns to Africa, the scene of his first successes, but not to the west of A Good Man in Africa or the east of An Ice-Cream War. Brazzaville Beach goes for the...
‘No Arnold can write a novel; if they could, I should have done it.’ That was Matthew Arnold’s reaction to his niece’s first significant attempt at fiction, Miss...