One of Raymond William’s polemical purposes in People of the Black Mountains, his final fiction, is to affirm that Wales has its own distinct identity, founded in unremembered time which reaches...
It’s not long since the fairy story seemed the least political of genres. Not so today. A preoccupation with transformation and escape, coupled with a repudiation of the sober certainties...
Anthony Trollope once proposed to write ‘a history of English prose fiction’, but ‘broke down in the task, because I could not endure the labour in addition to the other labours...
In Jerusalem, stones can do the work of flowers – at Jewish cemeteries, that is, where flowers on graves are taboo. To show you have been at a graveside you place a pebble or a chip or a...
Feminists used to know what they wanted. They wanted women to share the rights, the opportunities and as much of a place in the sun as men enjoy. Variations on this agenda were agreed in...
Christmas Break We’ve floored it from London. The bridge winches up; the moat bares To green algae silk, kitchen relics, The bones of suicides. The snow, fine as bride’s Fine lace,...
That E.M. Forster gave only two cheers for democracy, but three for D.H. Lawrence, on the occasion of Lawrence’s death, is well-known. Forster was upset that the lowbrows Lawrence...
In fiction the form of the fairy-tale and the sound of gossip are joined. The first allows heroes and heroines, tragic misunderstandings, farcical adventures, grotesque cruelties and happy...
Ferenczi wrote in 1938 that acts preparatory to coitus all served in different ways to duplicate the narcissistic self. The syllabus of kissing, stroking, biting and the rest facilitates the loss...
Nine years ago Herbert Tucker wrote an excellent first book, Browning’s Beginnings; like many first books it gave the impression of being a labour of love. Tucker’s second is a...
In a tacky glass-foundry yard, that is shadowy and bright as an old painter’s sweater stiffening with light, another lorry chockablock with bottles gets the raised thumb and there hoists up...
Ben Jonson is remembered as a master of English comedy, but you would hardly think so from his portrait. The earliest dateable likeness is the engraving by Robert Vaughan, done in the mid 1620s,...
1 The Jain monk would live in unending harmlessness, shedding karma, confessing, studying for the fasting death. He avoids quarrels and politics, may not repair three unmended garments, nuns...
for Arnost Lustig It’s swift, this exorbitant ripple of Rs: the sound to a British ear is something, roughly, like RORE-RAYS said fast as a bird. Trying out an odd word of yours, my tongue...
I remember to have wept with a sense of the unnecessary. ‘Do you think me so ungenerous that I need to be deceived about this? Do you think me such a fool that these tactics will deceive...
I am afraid this may prove rather a gossipy Inaugural Lecture but I feel it is the main thing I have to offer on this occasion. I could talk, instead, about my theoretical books, which have been...
The barber’s tubes and rubber bulbs, their wheezing scents, asthmatic talcs, have long since perished with the rest of his tribal paraphernalia; the Brylcreams set in misty jars and the...
There can’t be all that many people who are willing, in the presence of others, to call themselves intellectuals. There may even be those for whom intellectuals are a fiction, like fairies....