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...
There is no doubt about the achievement of Isaac Bashevis Singer. He is one of the foremost storytellers of our time. His output has been prolific and now, in his 82nd year, comes a collection of...
il n’y a pas de détail Valéry When I learned that my parents were returning to Germany, and that I was to be jettisoned, I gave a sudden lurch into infancy and Englishness....
Elizabeth was in bed. The dog had its front paws between her breasts, and, its tongue out, it stared at her as she spoke to it. Charles, the husband, undressed and hung his clothes askew on the...
The moon was open-mouthed with fear, on the night the Novik went down. The guns were greased, the decks were clear, the sea a steady frown. We knelt there ready for action, sweating in spite of...
In my game (and yours, reader) it was always the Frogmen had the clever theories. We did the dirty work using the English language like a roguish trowel. Tonight, two rubberised heads have set...
John le Carré has patiently established himself over the last twenty-five years as the discriminating reader’s favourite thriller writer. The BBC’s adaptations of the George...
Trotsky, who had a certain wit, even in literary matters, thought that women wrote poetry for only two reasons: because they desired a man and because they needed God, ‘as a combination of...