The Story of U And now the track is snowed with words, The poor train of childhood followed, A good aunt picking out the thirds On an old piano, gutted, hollowed By years which left the trees the...
He taught me to say ‘blacks’ without blenching. At his party I was the only white but did my waspish best not to notice. Though a student in my Freshman class, he was seasoned. He...
A novel may have a coherent plot, passably differentiated characters, fluent dialogue, passages of well-turned prose, and still be worthless if it isn’t also about something that matters....
Amusing, and perhaps instructive, to think of great paintings whose voyage into mystery and meaning seems to depend, in the first instance, on a technical trick: a separation of planes so that...
Why put the novels of Jane Austen onto a computer? The first thing that strikes you about Computation into Criticism is what it says about its Australian author’s dedication, or...
Every city has its minority, with its ironical, tiny village fortressed against the barbarians, the giant ransacks and the pillage of the larger faith. In England, for instance, the...
I’ve worked it out that when my parents parted some time at the end of ’43 I was about the size of a pea eroding the lining of mum’s womb. He had been on compassionate leave for...
Willa Cather is one of those American writers whose fictional accomplishments were both applauded and judged harshly when she was alive. Now, forty years after her death, they are the subject of...
Not actually spoken by the Convener of a Conference on Literary Journals held last month at the Australian National University at Canberra We’re gathered here today In Canberra To discourse...
After thirty years teaching German literature and writing radio plays, my father suddenly began to write fiction. Our Conquest was his fifth book in five years, and the second to be translated...
William Golding’s Rites of Passage, which appeared seven years ago, purported to be an account, by a young toff, good-natured but still wet behind the ears, of a voyage to Australia, around...
1. We live in a golden age of criticism. The dominant mode of literary expression in the late 20th century is not poetry, fiction, drama, film, but criticism and theory. By ‘dominant’...
Malcolm Bradbury has what the political image-makers call ‘high definition’. We know who he is, where he’s coming from, what he stands for. As a novelist he belongs to a...
To keep a single vision single, or perhaps to conserve their own energy, writers who deal in strong feelings and violent flavours most often choose narrow canvases. Not, however, A.S. Byatt. Her...
You press the bakelite button, and wait, and wait. Presently the lift rattles down to the ground floor, and the attendant passes you something through the brass grille. The chlorine sifts down...
Behind the voices of di Stefano And Callas, others sing. I seem to hear In the same stream an earlier Lucia Filling another room with love and woe. The fire, the sons, their parents smell of...
I’m looking at you, grandma the way you’re sitting in stiff lace in a long skirt in front of the cottage in Rakocice the date under the photograph 1913. You still don’t know...
In an essay on the death of Macaulay, Thackeray wrote movingly about the British Museum Reading Room, where the historian had done his great work: Many Londoners – not all – have...