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...
The slightest words define the most. Am, for instance, filling up a life, Expressing, if expression is compelled, The body’s territorial extent; Assertion’s power to concentrate A...
In the midst of a recent cold snap am off to Glasgow to speak at a dinner for the Brewers’ Benevolent Society. Super Shuttle involves free drinks but climbing in and out of buses. I tread...
‘Fear is a powerful stimulant,’ says Offred, the heroine of Margaret Atwood’s chilling tale of the near future. Trained at the Rachel and Leah Centre and habited in red, Offred...
One of the more useful side-effects of the widely-publicised troubles at the International PEN Congress held this January in New York may ironically have been the new timeliness which Norman...
The nightmare is that last straight into the camera – Dice among dice, jounced in a jouncing cup. Never any nearer, bouncing in a huddle, on the spot. Struggling all together, glued in a...
There seem to be about a hundred characters in The Recognitions, most of them United States citizens, but some of them change their names, escaping from law-men, and others have no known name at...
Peter Vansittart, novelist, historian and writer for children, has been singled out for praise by critics as diverse as Philip Toynbee, Francis King, Angus Wilson and Andrew Sinclair. All feel...
As a biology teacher at a large comprehensive school, my sister was given the job of taking the second-formers for sex education. To unblock inhibitions in the first lesson, she decided on a mild...