In a long tape-recorded conversation she had with Kay Dick in November 1970 (the best source for the flavour of her speech), Stevie Smith remarked: I’m straightforward but I’m not...
Rebecca West said that Olive Schreiner was a ‘geographical fact’. Others were reminded of a natural force, admired and dreaded, unchecked by illness, war or poverty, something new...
A certain man flew from Chicago to his native Golden Vale To resurrect a recurring dream from his childhood. The dream: A Frenchman called Lavoisier Being cooked in a bath till he revealed The...
August is the cruellest month, breeding tailbacks on the Dover Road and logjams in every departure lounge. Travel reverts to travail, stirring dull roots in trepalium – that classical...
Red brick on red brick. A boiled eye in a greenhouse. Lilac smoking in sere gutters and crevices. A pigtailed head on lamp-post after lamp-post. * We had taken my mother’s...
Among Australians, there are punishments for making one’s career abroad, just as there are for living and writing at home. Few of these punishments have come Clive James’s way. His...
It would be interesting to place Jay McInerney and David Holbrook as neighbours at E.M. Forster’s imaginary table. Both novelists are fascinated by decadence – that much they have in...
Penelope Fitzgerald has always seemed a quintessentially English novelist, low-key, exquisitely perceptive, and with a notable feeling for place – the seedy houseboats on the Thames in
Philip Larkin, we are told, left instructions in his will that certain of his writings had to be destroyed, unread. His executors obeyed: the word is that several of the poet’s notebooks, or...
Henry Crabb Robinson had a busy evening on 27 January 1818: having attended William Hazlitt’s lecture on Shakespeare and Milton at the Surrey Institution, he hurried over the river to the...
Faking it is no good. If you need caves, and there are no caves – if you’re shooting A Passage to India you need caves – then you need dynamite. If you need grass on the...
At the seaside dazed by the sun And its tremendous symphony, Strangers are friends. Families Under the cliffs uncover navels, Amorous bumps, far-fetched clefts; And the kids squeal with terror,...
Outlandishly theatrical, well-wrought and witty, Middlepost is Anthony Sher’s first novel. The jacket illustration – Sher’s own work – sets the tone. It presumably depicts...
I Weary of the cries God spoke to the Soul of Adam Saying: ‘Give me your body.’ And He Took Adam’s body and nailed it To a stake, saying: ‘This great beast Shall destroy...
‘The idea that Eliot’s poetry was rooted in private aspects of his life has now been accepted,’ says Lyndall Gordon in the Foreword to her second volume of biographical rooting...
The albatross which features in ‘The Ancient Mariner’ isn’t really an albatross – that’s to say it isn’t the albatross you first think of, the Great Wandering...
A recent photograph of Kingsley Amis shows him with a cat – a hairy cat with arched back, which is manoeuvring in relation to the author’s typewriter. The author’s face wears a...
Tiles are mostly abstract: tiles come from Islam: tiles have been through fire: tiles are a sacred charm: After the unbearable parallel trajectories of lit blank tile, tile-figures restore the...