Here, in these three novels, are three representations of the state of the art. In The Satanic Verses the narrator, who may or may not be the Devil, confides that ‘what follows is tragedy....

I find the possibilities of different genres attract me – I would be bored if I were confined to one, and this boredom would show in what I wrote; on the other hand, versatility has always raised natural...

I spent ten days in May in Russia on a visit arranged by the Great Britain-USSR Society. My colleagues were the novelists Paul Bailey, Christopher Hope and Timothy Mo (who also writes for Boxing...

On returning from Munich to St Petersburg in the spring of 1837, the poet Tyutchev, as well known for his wit as for his verse, told a friend that he was suffering not so much from Heimweh as

RC: When I came to the writing of these poems I hadn’t written any for about two years. I’d been writing stories, and I didn’t know if I’d ever write any more poems. I...

Opera Throw all your stagey chandeliers in wheelbarrows and move them north To celebrate my mother’s sewing-machine And her beneath an eighty watt bulb, pedalling Iambs on an antique metal...

Composers are supposed to die young, preferably of consumption. Their women, if their tastes lie in this direction, may be called to matrimony and motherhood: but they are seldom given to...

As a schoolboy, Rudyard Kipling used to stay in North End Road, Fulham with his aunt and uncle, the Burne-Joneses. One evening William Morris came into the nursery and, finding the children under...

There were already good biographies of Shaw, notably those of Frank Harris and Hesketh Pearson, both of whom knew Shaw and had the benefit of his energetic interventions. Pearson in particular...

For my parents, it was the strangulated crackle of the old gramophone tenor forlornly wailing ‘Pale hands I loved’; for me, it was Kim and lives of the Bengal Lancers; and for my...

A good student, ‘The place is lumbered,’ he tells me ‘with a Rump of ageing Hippies’ – and it’s true I can see Blakemen trapped in their burning beards and...

According to Gordon Ray, writing in 1956, all that posterity could reasonably expect to know about the elusive Wilkie Collins was his name and dates of birth and death. This has proved to be an...

Flying up a valley in the Alps where the rock rushes past like a broken diorama I’m struck by an acute feeling of precision – the way the wing-tips flex, just a little as the German...

Raymond Carver, acclaimed shot-story writer and poet, died on 2 August. A painstaking craftsman, he wrote most often about working-class Americans whose lives are, or have been, on the verge of...

Writers tend to regard editors, whether in journalism or in publishing, as people who have failed in the endeavour which they conceive themselves to have mastered and now wish merely to tamper with the...

The cracking of wax On hoods is today’s First report of heat. The Prometheus Ice Company Has expanded Its fleet Of blue and White wagons. Find them At the hottest spots In town. ...

for U.A. Fanthorpe Curtains A Busby-Berkeley stunner: thirty-second sequence of curtains swished back one after one all down the ward. I’m standing near my bed, a raw recruit, screened off...

It is hard now to recover the thrill of underground discovery, the hand-to-hand ardour, the feeling of claim engendered by A Hundred Years of Solitude. But Love in the Time of Cholera, like