Henry James was a perfectionist, though not a humourless one, about his public appearance and appearances: hence the pleasure taken by certain anecdotalists in showing him out of control –...
Thomas Hardy once told Robert Graves how he had gone to the Oxford English Dictionary to confirm the existence of a dialect word he proposed to use in a poem, and came to a standstill because the...
In Fin de Siècle Vienna, politics had become the least convincing of the performing arts. Life, Kraus wrote, had become an effort that deserved a better cause. By the turn of the century,...
AIDS Condoms can never save the world from germs – machines run out of them and chemists close; a friend blames two abortions on the things; some funny little foreign ones don’t fit;...
Many critics and reviewers persist in writing about Roth rather than his fiction. Why this persistence after all these years?If that’s so, it may have to do with the intensity with which my...
Charlie Chaplin was not hopeful when the talkies arrived in Hollywood. ‘It would mean giving up my tramp character entirely. Some people suggested that the tramp might talk. This was...
Wars and battles: these words, appearing prominently in the titles of two of the books under consideration, might give the impression that poetry, or criticism, or the criticism of poetry, is a...
Martial and Jonson frame my text, A pleasant catalogue of what Delights for you are to be got At lunch with me on Monday next: An avocado full of pink Prawns we will wash in a tide cleaner Than...
Go back to the opal sunset, where the wine Costs peanuts, and the avocado mousse Is thick and strong as cream from a jade cow. Before the passionfruit shrinks on the vine Go back to where the...
One day, when my father came home from work, he put his briefcase away behind the door and stripped to his vest and pants in the front room. He spread the pink towel with the rip in it on the...
In The Beet Queen Louise Erdrich has returned to the setting, period, narrative techniques, and to some of the characters, of her admired first novel, Love Medicine, and has made something even...
Mario Vargas Llosa has written a fine novel, political and unstintingly pessimistic, a dire collation of the fiasco of a single Peruvian life with the chronic mismanagement and distempers of...
The past is there to be made use of, and everyone makes use of it in his own way. Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson invent alternative Englands where radical social experiments were nipped in...
How do you like to be approached by a strange work of fiction? Do you prefer a hearty handshake (‘Call me Ishmael’), a more discursive line (‘All happy families are...
Let us be sexist. The Progress of Love is a woman’s book, particularly interesting to men who want to know what women think of them and know about them. Alice Munro is a 56-year-old...
This “long lost novel” isn’t a novel but a story of some twenty-five thousand words, here augmented by eight thousand from the pen of the translator, and by blank pages. The...
Patrick McGinley’s pastoral parable, The Red Men, begins with Gulban Heron, rural overlord of a hotel, a shop and four sons. There is dark-haired Jack, capable, ruthless, dissolute, his...
Getting the world right ‘Aye, once we get a Protestant Pope,’ my father cheeked shawlies in the snug, hard-nosed chars clattering gangplanks, early-morning mops. Next Door’s...