Few writers can claim to have quite literally saved their own lives through writing. In the second volume of her autobiography, Janet Frame describes how she was rescued from the leucotomy then...
Tolstoy was much preoccupied with questions of identity. His brutally penetrating intelligence, as well as the instinctive self-confidence of an aristocrat, were always running incredulously up...
Squawks are heard all over London these days from newly-fledged birds being pushed off the twig. The reasons for not leaving home multiply: no money, no job, rents high, flats scarce. With the...
Angela Carter’s Black Venus is Baudelaire’s Creole mistress Jeanne Duval, whose hair the poet once likened to a sea of ebony, among other things; his enchantment and her...
In a letter of May 1919 Hardy told his friend Sir George Douglas he hadn’t been doing much, ‘mainly destroying old papers’. ‘How they raise ghosts,’ he added. He was...
An airline ticket clerk, examining the author’s credit card in Seattle, asked him if he was related to the poet Stephen Spender. Assured of his customer’s identity, the clerk...
Poetry written in dialect seems to be undergoing a resurgence. Tony Harrison has made extensive use of Northern idioms. Tom Paulin has been busy raiding Ulster (and, I suspect, Scottish)...
Is there a law of gender among fictional narratives, according to which some types are characteristically male and others characteristically female? This question – posed by some recent...
There will be more of this, more of this than I had realised of finding our friends irrevocably changed, skewed like Guy Fawkes in a chair because all the muscles have gone and talking as if...
As she lies there naked on the only hot Day in a ruined August reading Hugo Williams, She looks up at the window-cleaner Who has hesitantly appeared. Wishing that he were Hugo Williams She...
Security is the problem that exercises both Philip Roth and Raymond Williams. The sort of ‘security’ I mean is the sort that spreads a feeling of insecurity – a fear of...
Two soluble aspirins spore in this glass, their mycelia fruiting the water, which I twist into milkiness. The whole world seems to slide into the drain by my window. It has rained and rained...
A.N. Wilson is something of an anachronism, and it was timely of him to make anachronism the nub of his new novel about the old days, Gentlemen in England. The title itself, in the England of...
Readers of American writing have been struck by the prevalence of what Dwight Macdonald once called ‘how-to-ism’. This is not simply a matter of guides to gadgetry, or to cooking, or...
Who carried a torch for August Strindberg? On his 63rd, and last, birthday, some ten thousand people, led by the Stockholm Workers’ Commune with bands and red union banners, marched past...
The psychologist John Layard – ‘Loony Layard’, as he is affectionately termed in one of Auden’s early poems – is said to have told a submarine officer that he had...
The sea froze that winter. The shallow tidal run rippled over the shores and then froze to a solid sheet. Ice formed on the groynes and the metal struts of the pier. The bait diggers had to break...
Before I got to the fourth and latest book in the exhausted but inexhaustible Henry Root corpus, I allowed myself some shallow research on his previous works. The first was memorable enough, even...