Along with the hearing-aid and the bifocals and other indices of personal decay goes an elderly fretfulness about staying alert in a world so teasing, so elusive, that even novels, which should...
No one could describe the last ten years as an uneventful period in English criticism, but there are times, and this February is one, when it all seems to boil down to a couple of brawls and a...
Sydney, February 1938. Miles Franklin, aged 58, attends a sesquicentenary celebration at Government House for ‘distinguished women’. The legendary author of My Brilliant Career (1901)...
Les Murray (b.1938) grew up on a dairy farm in northern New South Wales, an only child whose mother died of what seems to have been a medical misadventure when he was 12. The farmhouse was hardly...
Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities is his 11th book but his first novel. Happily for him, it looks like being that publisher’s dream, a runaway best-seller which is also...
He’s gone with her, and she has gone with him, And two are left behind; and there’s four more – The children, two of each; grandparents, still Alive and well, till now, and...
Kipling leapt into British fame at the beginning of 1890, and it had been Ireland which had given him his chance – that and the rich harvest of short stories from his Indian years. He hit...
It came as quite a shock when I lost Rahila Khan. I’d known her for two years and we were very close. I told my agent that Rahila wanted to write a letter to the Guardian about a witless...
When I peered down Onto Greenland’s appalling features Sheeted with snow-glare Under a hole of blaze in the violet (I had slid open the shutter Of the jet’s port-hole – I wanted...
Cynthia Ozick’s critical writing everywhere expresses a ferocious distaste for the purely aesthetic. The central idea in Art and Ardour, her collection of critical essays, concerns the...
On 1 December 1987 the New York Times ran a piece under the title ‘Yale Scholar’s Articles Found in Nazi Paper’. The scholar in question was the late Paul de Man, who had written...
Memory in sea-green with sea-weed grain of glass as the rearing wave rains briefly before a lot of bother on the beach of childhood and men with a burden file across sand. Those far-out surfaces...
The sea inspects its minutiae, rotating with an equal indulgence plastic, bladder wrack, eel-grass rejects nefarious oil-slicks, birling them up to the selvedge of high tide, relinquishing coral...
There is the idea of the story-taker, the necessary collaborator in the act of telling, the one who listens, shapes the narrative by assuming that there is something there to be told, who takes...
‘I thought I had best begin by expressing some old-buffer prejudices in general,’ Empson told the British Society of Aesthetics in 1961: ‘but now I will turn to English...
It is hard to know why the English should nowadays take so little interest in their Anglo-Saxon predecessors. Perhaps the main reasons lie in 20th-century history. The Victorian statue of King...
The publication of three substantial biographies of Jane Austen within a decade smacks of excess. But, compared with Lord David Cecil’s A Portrait of Jane Austen (1979) and John...
Patrick Miller’s first iron vessel, the world’s First steamship is swanning across Dalswinton Loch. A landscape painter, Alexander Naysmith Perches on deck beside his good friend,...