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
Michael Moorcock’s novel honours the loonies of London. It seems there are more of them every year, especially since – by one of the more perverse acts of enlightenment – the...
Alison Lurie’s new novel is, among other things, an anthology of several characters from her earlier novels. Readers unfamiliar with these books need not be apprehensive, however: The Truth...
Historical novels regularly try to hook you in to their unfamiliar worlds by some arresting initial display of their subject’s narrative potential. The technique goes back to Scott, and...
The Romantic era produced in abundance both self-dramatisers and self-esteemers. Despite their obvious relation, they are, and remain, two distinct species. In our own literature Byron is the...
They’d always out in the end – or so it was claimed – of their own accord. Then why did he vividly recall gouging at the wrinkled pad of his index with a brutal pin picked from...
The sun on its way down torched the clouds and left them to burn themselves out on the ground: the north-west wind and the sun both drop at once behind the mountains. The foreground fills with a...
Troubled countries usually cause troubled minds in their writers, as do troubled families or systems of belief: but while being so troubled may be a powerful incitement to literary production, it...
Mary Fiddler, a fine blooming lass of 18, her – is like silk itself, and bubbles as white as snow; she is just in her prime, and fit for business, she is broke in this spring, by a...
AH: I was thinking about the unusual shape of your career as an author – having written a collection of stories during the war when you were in your late teens and not published them for...
When policemen first started to look ridiculously young, I can’t say it bothered me (besides, it’s good for them to be younger – fitter, keener, less cynical). I found the...
Driving in the car with her Was wonderful! So close – He loved, without any rush To say so, Those guileless uncoverings of Legs getting in, their confidential Jostlings as long as he kept...