Listen to Jeffrey Robinson, American biographer of figures such as Sheikh Yamani, describing how he goes to work: What I usually do is get two or three months’ research under my belt...
Since the 18th century, and the novel’s coming of age, inventing female consciousness has become an absorbing masculine activity, a sex-in-the-head game. It is in the male head that...
The day the Nazi died his prison walls Were just hard dust Waiting to be smashed by demolition balls Swung from cranes to crack the hardened crust of that dead history – The walls of...
You’re interrupted in the book of the film By someone ringing who’s just seen your name As the title of an opera. You remember that doctor in Mallaig Born long before Disney and...
Late afternoon light, and such a pretty touch – the way the sun, slow- wheeling down the wall in a fall of white on white, clear into gold explodes just upon reaching the bowl of elaborate,...
The fight over the new Ulysses, like all academic arguments over commas, is a fight between two ideas of human nature, two visions of judgment, two images of eternity*. On one side of the textual...
It comes from wanting to be perfect. All human pain from spite to rape Is just a reading on the grape And all these living counterfeits Are for philosophers’ defeats. A discontent so...
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...