One may ask of Ms Ford’s book, rather as Alice asks of the White Knight’s poem: ‘What is it called?’ The title on the jacket is ‘Men’; the title on the...
To a Political Poet after Heine Your baggy lyrics, they’re like a cushion stuffed with smooth grudges and hairy heroes. ‘Me Mam’s Cremation’, ‘Me Rotten Grammar...
Alfieri, writing four hundred years after Petrarch’s death, tells us that when young he had dismissed Petrarch as ‘a bore, whose verses were ingenious and cold’. Many English...
Cooking Lessons She had us stand to the scratch of blades, opening, from Bramleys, flat spirals we’d match for length, so thin our knives ghosted through. Then, she’d pick from lifted...
Eudora Welty’s fictional territory stretches as far as the Northern States of her native America, and to Europe too, but its heartland is Jackson, Mississippi and its environs, a country...
Briefly during the second act Michael Frayn’s stage-play, Make and Break, transcends its setting, a Frankfurt trade fair, touching on a general gloom. Mrs Rogers is treating Garrard, a...
Scott Fitzgerald – who was renowned in his lifetime as much for his escapades with Zelda as for his contribution to literature – would doubtless be gratified to know how profoundly...
Wordsworth’s genius lay in its own sort of negative capability. The most striking feature of his poetry, as of his personality, is their intense and intimate relations with what always...
Raymond Carver is a typically American hero, a kind of literary Rocky – janitor, delivery man, sawmill operator, servicestation attendant, an uneducated alcoholic no-hoper who rises to...
It is unlikely that the governor of Lubianka gaol has ever boasted to visitors that his notorious dungeons were chosen as the setting for Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. But for over...
The British media finally caught up with the existence of Sam Shepard some eighteen months ago. He had, after all, just been nominated for an Oscar for his performance as Chuck Yeager in the film...
It is possible that C.J. Koch’s novel The Doubleman, which has just been published in London,* will be reviewed as a pathfinding contribution to literary psychology. A clever and diverting...
In the Great Book of Beginning we read That the word was God and was with God And are betrayed by the tiniest seed Of all the world’s beginnings, to thrash Like sprats in a bucket, caught...
[Details ofpresentsituation]I’ve reached the age, or shall do very soon,When Conrad trimly stepped from deck to dockAnd Proust withdrew into a cork-lined room,Lord Byron failed in love and...
Patience is a mark of the classic, according to Frank Kermode. ‘King Lear, underlying a thousand dispositions, subsists in change, prevails, by being patient of interpretation.’ It...
Birth of a Philosopher Plato was a young man when Helike sank below the waters of the gulf. The spasms of the earthquake could be felt all night, tugging at the roots of the city. For three days...
He had been asleep for seven and a half hours. He had lain in a dark room, wedged into a cotton envelope, breathing and twitching, his eyes periodically making saccadic movements under their...
This is undoubtedly the most thorough account of the life and times of Solzhenitsyn to date, but research cannot have been easy, even though Mr Scammell had the cooperation of Solzhenitsyn...