William Urry’s researches on Marlowe have been available in bits and pieces, and his ‘forthcoming book on the Marlowes in Canterbury’ was mentioned by one of Marlowe’s...
Make over the alleys and gardens to birdsong, The hour of not-for-an-hour. Lie still. Leave the socks you forgot on the clothes-line. Leave slugs to make free with the pansies. The jets will give...
Joseph Brodsky’s new selection, To Urania, gets off to a troubled start with a 20-line poem that contains at least one grammatical slip and a sentence of baffling absurdity. The slip occurs...
Naguib Mahfouz’s achievement as the greatest living Arab novelist and first Arab winner of the Nobel Prize has in small but significant measure now retrospectively vindicated his unmatched...
‘I am of that odious class of men called democrats,’ Wordsworth wrote to his friend William Mathews in 1794. Much the same can be said of Coleridge, on the evidence of his letters and...
Poetry Ten, no, five seconds after coming all over the place too soon, I was lying there wondering where to put the line-breaks in. Creative Writing Trying to persuade about fifteen Creative...
Stendhal wrote compulsively from an early age. He scribbled copious advice to himself in a diary, coached his elder sister by correspondence, wrote travel books, autobiographies, a treatise on...
John Kennedy was killed 25 years ago, on 22 November 1963. The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, known familiarly as the Warren Commission, issued its report...
T.S. Eliot and Prejudice. Keats and Embarrassment. The parallel between the title of Christopher Ricks’s new book and that of his earlier study of Keats is not accidental. In each case he...
The government department is deserted But all the lights are on. It lies below The pavement, rises up, a stump of glass, And all the lights are on, and no one there. It’s Friday night, at...
Reading the Faber Book of English History in Verse in East London was like trying to hold Radio 3 on the FM band.* The wavelength was under fire from all sides, and its measured strains kept...
Academic publishers in Britain are relying increasingly upon the series of monographs, a form which permits the development of brand loyalty and which allows a few excellent literary...
Before 1922 Hugh MacDiarmid did not exist. And only Christopher Murray Grieve would have dared to invent him. Alan Bold’s valuable biography points out that when the 30-year-old Grieve...
One day a long while ago Philip Larkin dropped a remark in passing about the difficulties of his current private life. He made it in the form of a jokey generalisation about the impossibility of...
Beauty, Danger and Dismay Beauty, danger and dismay Met me on the public way. Whichever I chose, I chose dismay. The Mistake With the mistake your life goes in reverse. Now you can see exactly...
One foot on the second-top step of the small flight Of stairs which lead to the door of her fine house, The other on the third, the very old lady Stands, staring dead ahead, clutching the...
No novelist can bring off a committee meeting with quite the flourish and high style of Robertson Davies. So it is good to report that his latest novel, The Lyre of Orpheus, opens (the theatrical...
The Wellesley Index originated in its founding editor Walter Houghton’s The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870 (1957), a manual which was influential among students of the Sixties....