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,...
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...