Penelope Fitzgerald’s new novel, like her last one, The Beginning of Spring, is set just before the First World War. Its locale, 1912 Cambridge, is not much less exotic than its...
The terms ‘Catholic writers’ and ‘women writers’ were invented by critics to make their own lives easier, at the cost, no doubt, of making the lives of certain authors...
She said, affably, ‘Calm next Mahnday,’ Indicating that his pants would be ready by then, But nonetheless unwittingly invoking a mysterious occasion, Which, on ultimate reflection,...
In his now-famous article ‘The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson gives one of the defining characteristics of Post-Modernism as being ‘the...
A novelist’s freedom, Nadine Gordimer wrote in 1975, is ‘his right to maintain and publish to the world a deep, intense, private view of the situation in which he finds his...
‘Julia died. I read it in the Times this morning... I never liked her, nor did she like me; strange, then, how we managed to keep up a sort of friendship for so long.’ The first...
One of the ‘quests’ of Byronian romanticism was to find out which feelings come by nature and which ones can be cultivated as part of a personal repertoire. The relation between...
Up at five o’clock on an August morning We carry light luggage out of the house. With heavy cases our children stoop. Their children are winged With small bright backpacks. The sky is a...
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...