‘But for Bunter the result might have been serious,’ says a character in the Magnet ‘India’ series of 1926, giving credit to the fat schoolboy blunderer whose tomfoolery...
His is a fine book, but I wish Mr Keach had supplied a more explicit context for it. Apart from saying that Shelley’s language hasn’t been adequately described, he relies on the...
We owe a large debt to the famous chapter on Robinson Crusoe in Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel. Watt really made us use our wits about that novel and forced us to relate it to our most...
In the current issue of a magazine called The Face there is an article on Norman Mailer’s recent visit to this country. He was here, it seems, to promote Tough guys don’t dance, his...
Most people would call Mr Burgess a prodigiously fluent writer, but he would demur, pointing out that a professional should be capable of a thousand words a day, which is 365,000 a year, or five...
Thomas Mann’s Diaries 11 January 1938 Tinkered with the weather. Arranged my writing-desk on the spare dentures. The black ink elegant and sinewy. Fog under the side table all morning until...
This year, despite the downward drift in almost every sphere, we are celebrating the 300th birthday of the still dearly beloved Handel in the midst of an astonishing revival of English...
‘The bird that I hope to catch in the net of this play is … the true quality of experience in a group of people, that cloudy, flickering, evanescent – fiercely charged! –...
In a recent Times article, Philip Howard pounced on the deplorable word ‘Valorisation’ which seems to be trying to edge its way into the English language. ‘To enhance the price,...
So far as the evidence of five novels goes, Anita Brookner has one basic theme, which she varies with considerable and increasing technical resource. All five books are quite short, and all have...
‘Kits’ are models the word for transfers is decals and six feet scale down to an inch. All the pilots were six feet tall. I dotted their faces flesh, which is fifteen parts white to...
There is an occasion in Sense and Sensibility when the three sisters go for a walk and perceive, in the distance, the coming-on of an interesting horseman. His approach casts something of the...
for Sebastian Barry Possible seals disappearing far-out off Pembrokeshire, sleek commas suddenly lost in the sea’s murky prose, came back to me (memories taking a year to surface) as we...
Genre fiction is as competitive as prizefighting. The current champion of thriller writers in America is Elmore ‘Dutch’ Leonard. With the imminent release of the film Stick (a...
Fifteen years after his death Mishima is everywhere. Penguin has just brought out Hagakure, Mishima’s idiosyncratic interpretation of the 18th-century code of samurai ethics, and The Life...
That year we had the worst winter I had known. It had taken two men with picks to break the ground in the churchyard, and when the soil was lifted it was in great jagged lumps as heavy as stone....
It is obvious that Isabel Allende’s novel about Chile, The House of the Spirits, has something about it that appeals to women readers: but I cannot imagine what that something is....
Recently I received a somewhat smug letter from one of the editors of PN Review asking me to contribute to yet another symposium on the state of critical chassis which still persists in Great...