John Murray’s fiction has always seemed to arise directly from the circumstances of his own life. At first, his work concentrated on his childhood and adolescence among the tiny, depressed...
The Meiji period: 44 years (1868-1912) of ‘Civilisation and Enlightenment’, of steam-trains, long-nosed barbarians, crystal chandeliers, fancy-dress balls and wars fought in Hungarian...
A lot of ground is covered by Three Continents. We begin in America with a pair of zealous twins, Harriet and Michael Wishwell (pronounced Witchell), 19 years old, both owning and expecting a lot...
BBC Radio has started a pleasant practice of filling the Christmas season with murder plays, mostly dramatised detective stories from the classic English phase of the 1920s and 1930s. This...
Like Tristram Shandy, Delmore Schwartz so hated his name that he sometimes used to attribute all of his misfortunes to it. It was an obsession he enjoyed feeding: he would invent ridiculous...
All the misfortunes of man, all the baleful reverses with which histories are filled … all of this is the result of not knowing how to dance. Molière, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme We...
No, he never saw her so, his wife naked Under her dress in trifling talk With somebody in that dark garden Down there – but he thought it. If he could trade this in For a sadder thought he...
Byron’s Problem When they come up to you, as you’re sitting quietly, and lay their fat boobs on your knees, and look into your eyes with their own big eyes and wistfully caress your...
The fame of Marshall McLuhan in the late Sixties, a period more favourable to guruism than the present, was beyond the dreams of even the most ambitious don. His slogans were quoted everywhere,...
In 1910 the German photographer August Sander began work on a never-to-be-completed ethnographic project which he called ‘Man of the 20th Century’. This grandiose scheme provides one...
Aharon Appelfeld lives a few miles west of Jerusalem in a maze-like conglomeration of attractive stone dwellings directly next to an ‘absorption centre’, where immigrants are...
‘Mayn’t your politics simply be the result of sexual maladjustment?’ This question, unobtrusively formulated in Stephen Spender’s Forward from Liberalism (1937), lurks as...
Pursuing the truth about the McCarthyite witch-hunt via 17th-century Salem, Arthur Miller was one day transfixed by an etching in a library. It had been made by an eyewitness of the original...
Writing about sex tends to go wrong in one of two related ways. The first is through embarrassment or over-excitement on the part of the author: overly rhapsodic descriptions of sex, in...
Jack Goody took early retirement from the prestigious post of William Wise Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and is now in a highly productive phase of his career....
Two poets, writing in nearly the same language (British English, American English) and born at nearly the same time (1952, 1951). One, Andrew Motion, is quite well-known in this country, though...
Off-duty – unashamedly off-capped, unbelted – she confides over coffee as to a friend or brother: today Manpower contacted her and they had lunch together. What’s worse, the...
Now that poetry has been brought into the marketplace, and publishers have discovered how to make a modest profit from it, and now that publication outlets can be found in any good-sized store,...