What could we do, you coming all the way down to London (day return) and me learning fast for exams? Looking up from atomic spectra, I said ‘A walk,’ but I honestly never planned on...
The poet who pretends to read John Austin’s essay on ‘Pretending’ Need never grasp its condescending Point that pretending can’t succeed. Thus the weak-minded, headstrong...
The first thing to notice about The Spell is that it is a good, readable story. Hermann Broch is considered ‘very hard to read’, wrote Martin Seymour-Smith in his useful guide, Novels...
A line running with its own logic from the Biblical wilderness to the theme-park; a link between motel-chains, breakfast cereals, Walt Disney and cryonic freezing: connections of this kind are...
Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel,* which Michael McKeon energetically bids to transcend, gave us, whatever else, the clear image and serviceable concept: ‘formal realism’, the...
The 1912 Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Gerhart Hauptmann. In that year two new names were added to the list of great non-winners of this prize, a list headed by Henrik Ibsen (d.1906)...
Three or four years ago, a friend of mine was asked to illustrate a Teaching English book for the Ministry of Education in Cairo. He was (is) an Egyptian, but an Egyptian from outside officialdom...
A Labour victory in the 1987 British General Election would have been a good thing for The Book and the Brotherhood and a disaster for The Child in Time. As it is, with Mrs Thatcher set to...
After the autobiographical candour of Empire of the Sun, J.G. Ballard returns to his familiar austere impersonality with The Day of Creation. Superficially, this latest terminal vision recalls...
Anita Brookner’s novels have been preoccupied with women who feel themselves to be profoundly separate. This may be the result of either choice or necessity, or of stoically making a choice...
If Robert Lowell had not been a Lowell would he ever have had the confidence to write the poems he did? It is impossible to imagine the scion of a distinguished English family using that family...
There are many small remote communities on the northern and western fringes of the British Isles which seem to have been in a state of decline for the last hundred years or so, as invasions and...
In The Other Garden Francis Wyndham manages a classic form, the first-person novella, with great delicacy and originality. His first person, as in his collection of short stories Mrs Henderson,...
Bring me the sweat of Gabriela Sabatini For I know it tastes as pure as Malvern water, Though laced with bright bubbles like the acqua minerale That melted the kidney stones of Michelangelo As...
Mona Simpson’s Anywhere but here might seem in one respect a common sort of first novel: it is a book about an intelligent child growing up with a troublesome parent. In fact, though, it is...
On the 11th of July the Belfast-London shuttle was an airlift by jumbo-jet. But the exodus I joined had nothing to do with political panic. It meant holiday-time – ‘the Twelfth...
for Isaiah Berlin My story? Yes, I got my story though not the one I was assigned. It was a Voyage of Discovery all right, but of another kind. The latest Russian Revolution was no sooner known...
Bloomsbury on the left, Neo-Pagans on the right, these columns represent, more or less, Paul Delany’s relative definition of the two Edwardian intellectual groups. The first two pairs of...