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...
I A double fugue for wings The phallaina, the moth The Winged Wurm, And the harbour lights Snaking in their busy sleep In the nesting water. And in the dark of morning The spirit-candles passing...
Of all the raw deals meted out in the Bible – not excluding Job’s or that blighted fig tree’s – Moses surely suffered the meanest. After all he had gone through for Yaweh...
The volumes of the British Literary Magazines series (three out of four of which have now been published) are primarily works of ready reference. Alphabetically arranged within historical period,...
‘My idea of what a novelist should do is an old-fashioned one,’ says a character in the title story in Isabel Colegate’s collection A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory. ‘I...
Stirs; quite delicately sips; yawns over Friday’s yellowed Advertiser ... Outside is cold as inside is cold, wind flights over the marsh, the walls of the sky drip as Vic already rises,...
Reeling between the redhead and the blonde Don Juan caught the eye of the brunette. He had no special mission like James Bond. He didn’t play the lute or read Le Monde. Why was it he on...
Marguerite Yourcenar was born in Brussels in 1903. She became a US citizen in 1947 and has lived for more than thirty years on Mount Desert Island, off the coast of Maine. Thus when she was...
The tide had drawn the river out and made their bridal bed immaculate. Too late now to stop. Already they had grown amphibious and entered slithering and stripping off Age after Age of formal...