The item which seems set to stay longest with me from Ian Jack’s alert and precisely-written record of British life in the Seventies and Eighties comes from the opening memoir of his...
Lawrence’s maxim ‘we shed our sicknesses in books’ is usually applied to Sons and Lovers, where he disposed of his nearly fatal over-attachment to his mother. But Women in Love...
A bed of them looks like a dressing-room backstage after the chorus changed costume, ruffled heaps of papery orange petticoats and slick pink satin bodices. Every petal’s base is marked...
Last to Go Things not necessarily funny will stick in the memory, like recipes for success, or how one once stood up laughing, happy, a chip off the old block; and I too, some days, rise, the...
How heightened the taste! – of champagne at the piano; of little side-kisses to tickle the fancy At the party to mark our sarcastic account of the overblown Mass of the Masses by Finzi (An...
Peter Ackroyd’s new novel has been caught in the Gadarene rush of fiction brought out in time for the Booker Prize deadline. It won’t be lost in this year’s profusion of titles,...
According to John Ruskin, ‘in the work of the great masters death is always either heroic, deserved, or quiet and natural.’ Not so in Marguerite Yourcenar’s world. She is...
Twenty years ago, there was a fairly well-known English monk at the Hinayana Buddhist Centre in London who liked to cap the account he gave visitors of why he had rejected the West by pointing...
There are many perils in writing about Kafka. His work has been garrisoned by armies of critics with some fifteen thousand books about him at the last count. As there is a Fortress Freud so is...
Spalding Gray is a 45-year-old American actor who uses the events of his own life as grist for a series of epic monologues. ‘Stories seem to fly to me and stick,’ he declares in the...
From Playa de Giron the two-lane blacktop Sticks to the shoreline of the Bay of Pigs – The swamp’s fringe on your left showing the sea Through twisted trees, the main swamp on your...
Conrad Russell was a nephew of the ninth Duke of Bedford: every publisher in Great Russell Street and Bedford Square must have wanted to publish his selected letters, if only from simple loyalty...
As well as having themes, preoccupations and voices, writers often have a favourite cadence, which is sometimes apparent as the shape towards which their fictions tend. If they do have such a...
It sounds like it’s something to do with helping, but that is very far from its meaning. I can’t remember when we first started hearing it; no more than five or six years ago, surely....
In 1972 the final issue of Ian Hamilton’s Review was given over to a symposium on ‘The State of Poetry’. Only fifteen years on, it has the flavour of a yellowed historical...
Why do the ivy and hawthorn glisten With an archaic light this morning? Why is their bending and shaking Under the easterly off the Pennines So much like a resigned bowing Under the buffets of...
I have already reported here, in verse, on my recent trip to a Conference on Literary Journals in Canberra, Australia, and on the death-struggle that did not take place there, but perhaps should...
‘In the gloom, gold gathers the light against it.’ In choosing this line from Pound’s 11th Canto as one of the epigraphs to his Collected Poems, Geoffrey Hill concentrates our...