Not yet a student of fastidious geisha pillow talk, or subtle sticky desert nights on perfumed rugs, or tendril limbs of Hindu gods exposing how to shag a thousand ways in stone, or...
What fever is Burning under the shrunk turf of our days? The sky is dark with winter, but what rises Smokily from the heap distinctly says: Here is fire: and yet a thousand ways Promises chill. A...
There is a scene which recurs in several of Hitchcock’s films and which could well be in all of them, since it is so central to his favourite fear. An innocent man is discovered in a...
As in previous times of plague, we have begun to ‘see’ dogs as warnings: Padfoot, Trash, Shriker, Black Shuck, Pooka, or the Hound of the Baskervilles. They are messengers of death, dark familiars...
R.K. Narayan has the most godlike of the novelist’s powers: to know all his characters equally well – too well to love or hate them, except, perhaps, in a godlike way, as parts of the...
STC First there are the jokes about how it’s going on the ‘South Col’, or the ‘Big C’; but half serious, as if you really had returned from inching your way up a...
I have always wondered when my grandparents realised they would never see Russia again. In July 1917, when they locked up the house on Fourstatskaya Street in Petrograd, left the key with my...
Leonard Woolf’s earlier years coincided with the last great age of letter-writing. Moreover his friends were people who had what may now seem an unusually pressing need to keep in touch...
In many ways, Paula Backscheider has written a highly appropriate life of Defoe. Fat, fact-filled and repetitious, her book offers a meandering narrative of merchant adventures and spying,...
As the debate about German identity enters a new phase, the work of Marcel Reich-Ranicki acquires a special interest. His career crosses several ideological frontiers: from Pilsudski’s...
A bolt-eyed, blue-shirted, shock headed hatless man ... ‘Mrs Woolf? ... I’m Graves.’ He appeared to have been rushing through the air at sixty miles an hour and to have...
I thought all I felt was annoyance, not even anger, So many plans to change, we were in the wrong country, On the other side of an ocean, words get changed Coming through water, I thought,...
Harriet Guest’s starting-point is Donald Davie’s suggestion in 1958 that Christopher Smart might be considered ‘the greatest poet between Pope and Wordsworth’. Her...
Fielding was born in 1707 into a family in straitened circumstances but of aristocratic connections. A family myth, based on forged papers, claimed descent from the Hapsburgs. The combination of...
In March 1889 Edward Arber applied for the vacant chair of English Literature and Language at University College London. Arber’s career had been unusual. He began his working life at 17 as...
The ‘beautiful laundrette’ that provides the title for Hanif Kureishi’s first film catches the flavour of his very personal brand of humour – off beat, off-the-wall with a...
‘Something is happening to the way we think,’ said Clifford Geertz in 1980, and Stanley Fish is right to add that Geertz was partly responsible for the shift. But Fish, in a bold essay...
Hazlitt has a modern feel about him. Among the poets of his age, dying young or turning, like Wordsworth, into pillars of the establishment, he represents a kind of muddling through, an honesty...