Among the attractions of diaries are the glimpses they give of the minutiae of daily life which – as is particularly the case in the 20th century – all the time undergo changes that...
With the publication of his latest novel, Illywhacker, the author of The Fat Man in History has secured himself a prominent place in the history of the fat book. If you’re not normally a...
The Victorian novelists are commonly supposed to have been soft on the subject of death: ‘one would need a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell’ is the best-known...
It is difficult to assess the value of the part played by the organisation known as Phantom during this stage of our operations in North Africa. Official History of the Second World War ...
To have a first novel published when you are over seventy is, I suppose, a fairly unusual thing to do. Why wait till then? The question keeps cropping up, so I have to make a serious attempt to...
A book could be – perhaps already has been – written on art whose success is connected with getting outside the idiom and context of its age. Such art reassures by its apparent...
She gutted the closets When he lay deathsick – Found his laces And lipsticks. – No more grieving For you she said, It’s a waste of good Heart’s blood: Groan and crumble!...
The scouring of foreskins accomplished, all smegma flushed out of its lair Gear tightly stowed, hair washed, face shaved and briskly slapped With Noir for Men – a girl need fear nothing but...
Men in white on ladders Scale the walls, then pose on planks, Staring straight ahead as if they’re peeing; All afternoon hands juggle. Then, bottoms bulging out of overalls, descend, To...
Why these books should have come to a male reviewer is perhaps more a question for the editor than myself. All the same, it is an issue that can hardly be ducked in the context of present-day...
‘Here’s something out of the quaint past, a man reading a book,’ remarks E.L. Doctorow’s narrator as he rides the New York subway. The other passengers in the subway are...
Geoffrey Hill’s second collection of poems, King Log, was published in 1968, that year of student radicalism and disappointment. Hill’s title is reactionary in its implications and...
Paying for Sex A Hollywood actress who’d come to stay with a born-again film extra in Richmond asked where she could pay for sex in London. On being told that there was no such place, she...
Since his death in 1977, Nabokov has made three literary appearances: rather plodding affairs for such a gifted ghost, even allowing for their modest academic occasions and for the fact that the...
Recollections of George Oppen in a Letter to a Friend ‘This lime-tree bower my prison’ ...
Josef Skvorecky left Czechoslovakia in 1968 and is now Professor of English at Erindale College in Canada. His new novel is about a Czech called Danny Smiricky who also emigrated to Canada in...
Homesickness is fabulous magic. Even as the world shrinks and the epic edge is blunted, the resettlement myth persists. Ulyssean travelogues are few and far between in Caryl Phillips’s The...
It seems a shame that Eric Linklater was, as his biographer records, perpetually dissatisfied with how his work was received. His third novel (Juan in America, 1931) was the Book Society Choice...