According to the traditions of the Prophet reported by Al Bukhari, Muhammad once declared that those who would be most severely punished on the Day of Judgment were the ‘portrayers’ (
You wouldn’t think it to look at me, but I was a hot property once upon a time to my sponsors, Johnson and Johnson Baby Oil. I reached the final of the 1980 World Powerboat Championship...
His cousin Oliver Baldwin described Kipling’s story ‘Mary Postgate’ as ‘the wickedest story in the world’. It did shock its readers very much, but it is not entirely...
A small charge for admission. Believers only. Who present their tickets where a five- barred farm gate gapes on its chain and will file on to the thinly grassed paddock. Out of afternoon...
I said, I once heard a story which I believe, that Leontius the son of Aglaion, on his way up from the Piraeus under the outer side of the northern wall, becoming aware of dead bodies that lay...
Science Fiction, it has been said, is always and necessarily a metaphoric reflection of some aspect of contemporary society. This sounds a depressingly goody-goody theory, the kind of thing which...
Nostalgia – literally ‘homesickness’ – ranks high among the motives of modern historians. The genre we call history has evolved over the last four centuries as the...
In ‘The Birthplace’ (1903), a tale inspired by the case of a couple who had served as custodians of the Shakespeare house in Stratford, Henry James constructed a marvellously ironic...
The artist Benjamin Haydon said of Keats, probably with affectionate disapproval, that ‘one day he was full of an epic poem! – another, epic poems were splendid impositions on the...
The fuss about gender continues. Feminist criticism has gone off in several odd directions lately, resorting more and more to jargon of the gynocentric, phallogocentric variety, and positing a...
Evening News, Edited, Printed and Published in Scotland’s Capital City, Saturday, 15 August 1987 There’s a wee Evil Spirit abroad in a wee West Lothian family, a wee Invisible Force...
So characteristic of Paul Muldoon’s poetry as to be almost a hallmark is the moment, unnerving and exciting in about equal measures, when his speaker is suddenly revealed to himself as...
Let there not be a single stripe, a single spot, a single stray grey sock or tartan-bordered handkerchief, implores Miss Sumpter, that goes with the white wash into the tub or into the machine,...
Dear God, What is the purpose of it all? Why do you make such contradictory demands of us? Why do you punish us for doing what you compel us to do? Why have you put us here, in this labyrinthine...
Like Hoyle and Stephen Potter, Georges Perec was a devotee of indoor games. La Vie Mode d’Emploi (1978), a title combining lifemanship, gamesmanship and one-upmanship, was the monumental...
‘Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.’ The weighty agonies and agonisings of Flaubert, most famously over the details of
‘A firm light quick step’ – after lunch, amongst casualties – ‘and a steady quick hand: these are the desiderata.’ Night-light under the alders. In the dark...
The best, perhaps, has survived, but a great deal of Elizabethan drama has not. The number of titles mentioned in contemporary documents – the account books of the impresario Philip...