His Buick was too wide and didn’t slow, Our wing-mirrors kissing in a Suffolk lane, No sweat, not worth the exchange of addresses. High from the rainchecking satellites England’s like...
The ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry which Plato described, and in which he took part, is still being fought. Poetry today has become, more generally, ‘rhetoric’,...
We broke slim boughs to stir and sift the leaf-mould. I was befogged by earth-colours, my earthbound sight an Axminster of swirling oak-leaves, beech-mast, till I had trimmed my focus to detail,...
Norman Tebbit, Conservative Party Chairman, was displeased by television coverage of the American attack on Libya. British public opinion had swung so decisively against the raid, he said,...
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), the 125th anniversary of whose birth is being celebrated by a series of festival events in London this month, returned to Bengal in September 1913 after a...
A large house across the road was being renovated by a foreign doctor. Aboriginals had lived there. The workmen burned the shabby reminders of their stay on a great...
Life and work are in the happiest relation when the life comfortably includes the work; the relation becomes unhappy when the work threatens to preclude the life. Then we have a competition...
Triangular Macquarie Place, up from the Quay, Is half rain forest, half a sculpture park Where can be found – hemmed in by palms and ferns, Trees touching overhead – the Obelisk From...
Four of these novels are political, not to be taken lightly. Acts of Faith and The Nuclear Age are concerned with the terror offered to us all by the nuclear deterrent. This is a large theme and...
‘Mourning is a hard business,’ Cesare said. ‘If people knew there’d be less death.’ From Malamud’s ‘Life is Better than Death’ In February 1961...
I could only dream, I could never draw, In Art with the terrifying Mrs Jaspar Whom I would have done anything to please. Aquiline and aloof in the land of the button nose, her smile Made her seem...
How and why do some writers’ characters live from the word go? It may not be necessary that they should; it may not even be to the writer’s purpose and advantage. Shakespeare’s...
I dreamt last night of my own Death. As I died, I became the Wren Library in Nevile’s Court in Trinity College, Cambridge. Dying, The library became even more Luminous, its splendid thinly...
A few months ago I went one Sunday evening to a Broadway theatre, not to see a play but to enjoy what was meant to be a thrilling contest between Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal. The place was packed;...
If the preferred style in American fiction of the last two decades could be summed up in a single title, it would surely be ‘Lost in the Funhouse’. John Barth’s short story,...
the bar-flies called him. At seventy he still dived – ‘Always get my head wet before my feet’ – and climbed the Deyá hills, goatish, quixotic, tilting at something....
Amy Clampitt is a most spirited and exhilarating performer. An enormous appetite for observation and zeal to describe precisely what she has observed are transmitted through both the best and the...
I have been asking myself lately why reading collections of short stories should be a slog, and I think I have found the answer. It’s the problem of the rich man with a closet full of new...