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...

Some sixty years ago, when David Thomson was a boy, he suffered from a condition that badly affected his eyesight. He could see, but poorly. He read Braille and, though this was forbidden, the...

Staying at about the age of eleven with a friend whose father was a doctor, I was put in a room where the only reading-matter was a medical textbook and the first volume of what was to become...

A German scholar has listed as many as 385 Medieval books which carry ‘mirror’ titles: The Mirour of Alkemy, Miroir de l’Ame, Spieghel Historiael, Speculum Ecclesiae, and so on....

Flat feet kept Einstein out of the army. The Emperor’s horse considers its position. In Akasaka men sit down and weep Because the night must end. At Chez Oz I discussed my old...

When Oxford decided to do Shakespeare they clearly made up their minds that the scale of the operation must be very grand, and a team of scholars has been working hard for eight years to get it...

Here is the note of a quite distinctive sort of English novelist: Not everybody in Britain on that night in November was alone, incapacitated, or in gaol. Nevertheless, over the country...

The deck is bedded with purple blooms that wither or disappear under the purser’s footfalls. The chairs were put out at the start, and now the flying fish match the queer colours of the...

Douglas Dunn’s Selected Poems includes the greater part of his published poems, from Terry Street (published in 1969, and reissued with this selection) through four more volumes to the...

This comes from ‘Thinkability’, the introduction to Einstein’s Monsters, and is, in a way, a typical Martin Amis paragraph: Every morning, six days a week, I leave the house...

The Life and Letters of John Galsworthy by H.V. Marrot appeared at the end of 1935, not quite three years after its subject’s death, and must be one of the very last examples of what was by...

There is a certain kind of knowledge – perhaps the most important – that cannot be explicitly taught or diligently learnt. For example, a tribe of Indians on the river Xingu lives on...

‘If one spirit animates the whole, what about the aeroplanes?’ queries a character in Virginia Woolf’s last novel, Between the Acts. Both Alex Zwerdling in Virginia Woolf and...

With A Darkness in the Eye M.S. Power completes his terrorist trilogy. It is set, as are parts one and two, in a characterless city called Belfast, and opens as they do with news of a killing,...

‘To vanish from sight; be traceable no farther; cease to be present; be lost, especially without explanation.’ The verb in question normally behaves intransitively, but in Argentina...

This is the first of two volumes in which Alan Heuser is making a selection of Louis MacNeice’s occasional writings. The first is mainly his reviews of Classical and modern literature; the...