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...
John Betjeman was nicely eccentric, and droll in a way mysteriously suited to English taste. His being so droll allowed him to display an out-of-the-way learning that might otherwise have seemed...
No English-speaking poet of this century has been the subject of as much biographical scrutiny as Ezra Pound. As in the case of Byron, Pound’s literary works and his personal life were...
Since Plato, the major European philosophers, consistent upon almost nothing else, have been united in a sustained denunciation of rhetoric. Brian Vickers’s In Defence of Rhetoric is an...
There are not many facts available about Donald Barthelme, at least on this side of the Atlantic. He has been hailed as a leading Post-Modernist, but Post-Modernism (to the extent that it has a...
We met a school, a family, or, we guessed, a little university of dolphins, that rolled around us, looking up with interest at the full sails that pulled us by so fast, with a sweet tickling, not...
The title of Joyce Carol Oates’s new novel is well-chosen, being itself both a fragment of popular culture (‘As time goes by’ seems to be lodged there pretty firmly by now) and...
Frank Kermode’s History and Value reads the literature of the Thirties as ‘a love story, almost a story of forbidden love’. The story is usually told in political terms, but the...