This is a gathering of David Lodge’s easy pieces: they are footnotes, shouldernotes and headnotes to the formal work in fiction and literary criticism he has published in the past twenty...
Julian Barnes once trained to be a barrister and he’s been asking questions ever since – questions, mostly, about questions. In Before she met me, the hero of the book actually...
It is often late, by chance, and with sudden delight, that we find those poets who later become vital to us. I knew Sorley MacLean by reputation before I felt his authority. His renovation of a...
Sated with hermeneutics, weary of metacriticism? No head for the heights of abstraction – vertigo hits you as soon as you set foot on the gossamer constructions of current art theory? You...
In memory of Jane Canfield ‘The speed of light is not the limit. We Are free. We glide. Our superluminous Velocity will take us far. For us, The superluminous is only the Beginning of our...
Readers of John Updike’s previous novel, The Witches of Eastwick, will not have forgotten Darryl Van Horne’s bottom: how, at the end of a game of tennis, Darryl dropped his shorts and...
Suppose Mr and Mrs Coleridge to be young SDP yuppies today, who have asked us to dinner. What impression of each should we get? Of an amiable but very silly young man who talked too much and put...
From the mansion staircase the marble floor is a chessboard And she is a round plump pawn moving from square to square Scrubbing that floor clean, While up above, the detective watches her As...
When Heinrich Böll died, last year, we had come to respect him as a Roman Catholic pacifist, a Nobel Prizeman speaking measured words to young idealists. We may have forgotten the work of...
In Exiles and Emigrés (1970) Terry Eagleton argued that modern British culture had proved incapable of producing a major writer who could analyse society as a whole. It had collapsed into...
On the September Friday that I arrived in Turin – to renew a conversation with Primo Levi that we had begun one afternoon in London the spring before – I asked to be shown around the...
In the fourth act of Measure for Measure the Provost describes the prisoner Barnardine, whose head, when severed, it is proposed to pass off as Claudio’s, as ‘a man that apprehends...
When I grow up I want to have a bad leg. I want to limp down the street I live in without knowing where I am. I want the disease where you put your hand on your hip and lean forward slightly,...
The men who first set foot on the bleached waste That is the moon saw rising near in space A planetary oasis that surpassed The homesick longings of their voyaging race: Emerald and ultramarine...
Piers Paul Read’s Free Frenchman is Bertrand de Roujay, whose most significant act is to repudiate Pétain and his expedient administration at Vichy, and take himself to London,...
To his closest friends, after Elizabeth Barrett’s death, Browning repeatedly spoke of the present as a country of exile. He wrote to Isa Blagden in July 1867 of taking ‘the three...
Was it thrup or thrip, your word for the thunderflies that came off the cornfield with the paddlesteaming combine, like wafted ashes sticking to our bodies and warning us of this: the yellowing...
In the Beginning You existed for months as an echo bouncing off darkness and silence, then changed yourself at a glance to the delicate bones of a kipper dandled to and fro in the waves of a...