I myself have seen the wild roses grow upon the very ground which is now the centre of the borough of Bootle. William Ewart Gladstone This road I trogged to school down, eleven-plus, in...

Katherine Mansfield, unlucky in life, has been lucky in death. Where some figures sink under successive waves of literary fashion, she remains buoyant. One Mansfield vanishes but another takes...

On 27 October 1954 the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh visited the University of Sheffield in order to inaugurate its Jubilee Session. No other reigning sovereign had visited the principal...

There were giant-killers in those days. Storm Jameson, rallying English writers in defence of peace and collective security, had to toss up to decide between Rebecca West and Rose Macaulay for...

My father was a tall man who approved of beating, but my mother, like a mother stone, preferred us to be sitting in a small room lined with damson-coloured velvet thinking quietly to ourselves,...

Writing in 1842 to his friend Alfred Domett, who had emigrated to New Zealand, Robert Browning enclosed ‘Tennyson’s new vol. and, alas, the old with it – that is what he calls...

In 1913, when she was 20 and had already published two volumes of poetry, Marina Tsvetaeva wrote the following prophetic lines, translated by Vladimir Nabokov in 1972: Amidst the dust of...

Here begins a review of two books which are largely collections of reviews, and some readers, reviewing it, are sure to ask whether this flea-on-flea process is desirable or even tolerable. My...

This actor is no more Danish Than I am; no more murderer or prince Than I. Chances are He’s never seen a ghost. Elsinore is a stage with sets And curtains. The wardrobe mistress Worked half...

Toni Morrison’s novels have been constructed, and are magically unsettled, by the unique character of historical memory for black Americans. That is to say, she has wanted to account for...

According to Oscar Wilde, before Dickens there were no fogs, and before Turner no sunsets. Wilde is merely exaggerating a truth, practising the art of aphorism, drawing our attention to this...

Richardson is the Hugo, hélas! of the 18th-century English novel, as Coleridge might have said: ‘I confess that it has cost – still costs my philosophy some exertion not to be...

It was early morning, so early that Gil MacLean loaded the colt into the truck box under a sky still scattered with faint stars. The old man circled the truck once, checking the tail gate, the...

Richard Ellmann’s Life of Joyce, generally regarded as the best literary biography of our time, was the work of his middle years. The last third of his own life was largely given to this...

The Tin Wash Dish Lank poverty, dank poverty, its pants wear through at fork and knee. It warms its hands over burning shames, refers to its fate as Them and He and delights in things by their...

In a recipe for turnip soup the cookery writer Ambrose Heath asserted that turnips have ‘an entirely masculine flavour, peppery and very definite’. For several centuries male writers...

In 1975 Colin Ward described Spitalfields as a classic inner-city ‘zone of transition’. Bordering on the City of London, the place had traditionally been a densely-populated...

1. Flying in Nothing but the curl of my toes keeps this thing Airborne, or it would slip to meet its wispy shadow Edging below across deserted villages, encroaching desert. How long is a piece of...