Looking back over more than fifty years of publishing, I count myself lucky to have begun by working for Constant Huntington, chairman of Putnam, a Bostonian of soldierly appearance, blessed with...
It was the young Auden, writing at about the time he was composing his ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, who declared that you could tell if someone was going to be a poet by considering his...
My life. I live with it. I look at it. My spied on, with malice. It’s my wife. It’s my husband. It sleeps with me. I wake with it. It doesn’t matter. If I’m unfaithful...
Coleridge has always been our representative Romantic literary critic, and Matthew Arnold has long been thought of as the type of the Victorian critic. There is, perhaps, no need to topple Arnold...
It seems likely that critics in the future will see the literature of our age as being peculiarly obsessed with a perverse version of mimesis. They will have no trouble in classifying its...
Any boy scout strolling down Sunset Boulevard with his ears unwaxed these days could be forgiven for concluding that America invented Southern California in order to compensate Britain for the...
By the time he was 20 Henri Fournier wasn’t able to say whether it was the country itself that he missed – Epineuil-le-Fleuriel, in the heart of the old Berry province – or the...
In the Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche maintains that life and the world are justifiable only aesthetically. The world is to be understood the way an artwork is, and life can become an artwork. If...
Eva Braun The moon beams like Eva Braun’s bare bottom On rockets aimed at London, then at the sky Where, in orbit to the dark side, astronauts Read from Mein Kompf to a delighted world....
The rumour of my death has long abated. The Greeks still love me, but I don’t love Greeks Except for one – or two; I must be fated To wander and to change; when the mast creaks I smell...
One might say that the problem with Emma Hamilton is knowing quite how to take her. Near the end of her book, Flora Fraser quotes a startlingly vivid account of Emma’s behaviour just after...
John Wesley had a few words for Sterne: ‘For oddity, uncouthness, and unlikeness to all the world beside, I suppose the writer is without a rival.’ Well, something odd will do for...
London, 30 January. A meeting at the Royal Court re Kafka’s Dick, now put off until September. Their next play is an adaptation by Howard Barker of Women beware women, and the production...
There are four beach huts, numbered 13 to 16, Each with net curtains and a lock. Who owns them, what happened to the first twelve, Whether there are plans for further building: There’s no...
The narrator and protagonist of Answered Prayers is one P.B. Jones, failed writer and competent sexual athlete, a scurrilous charmer who – to lift a pithy phrase from the poet Martial...
In a Trailways, shaking over red clay, wild poor shapes hang in a sulky wind of glazed polythene. As we start, a child bellows softly, she mews at her mother’s breasts pressed up into the v...
The writing of verse is a disease to which too little attention has been paid by the public health authorities. The number of more or less unavoidable cases is small, but the contagion is...
My grandmother, who was born about 1880, was proud of the fact that both her parents were born in New Zealand. It made her, she used to say, ‘a real Pig Islander’. A story she told me...