Geoffrey Grigson’s best poem, and the type of his best poetry, is ‘His Swans’. Evidently and justly, he thinks well enough of it to put it in the Faber Book of Reflective Verse...
The Austrian writer Peter Handke is so successful and so prolific that, reviewing one of his recent novels, his arch-enemy Marcel Reich-Ranicki, literary editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine...
We still have a Queen of Crime. For nearly twenty years Ruth Rendell has been hailed as the successor to Sayers, Christie, Marsh and Allingham, perpetuating the old question of why it is that...
They have arranged themselves like show animals: the tulips sleek, blood-colour; the slightly fierce carnations; the double-daffodils with green tongues. You’d think they should have...
One day when I was walking down the street You’ll never guess who I did meet. Margaret Thatcher, who got out of a car And went into a Public Bar. Up to the counter she walked briskly And...
Hobbyists by the river Under the cold hairy willows, In peaked caps and faded railway overalls And astride saddle-sized model trains, Chug under bare willow wickerwork gilded by winter sun...
In 1892 A.C. Benson published an essay which introduced the modern appreciation of Andrew Marvell. For more than two hundred years Marvell’s verse had shared with Metaphysical poetry a...
In Sartre’s Les Mots, there is a mise-en-abîme in which he writes of his youthful fascination with a volume on the childhood of illustrious men: in each life-history – as here in...
An American professor of English literature, small, female, fiftyish, moves about in a jumbo flying towards London. Through long practice, she solves the problems of avoiding the film and finding...
You knew you were lucky, born all of a piece and born into peace. So why were you seeing your father off from the flagstone step wearing your sweet little cowboy suit – distressed leather...
Once upon a time the novelist’s task was to be realistic and to tell a story that was lifelike, convincing and ‘sincere’. Today’s novelists are counter-Aristotelians,...
‘For me the crown is the symbol of the unity of the tribe.’ Ted Hughes St nissan mishan biskit bingo hut an skwidbone strand win me sunday fraym fotograf av momma kween. But me...
Places in fiction often have a curious dual nationality. They are entangled in historical events, marked on a solid social map. ‘It’s not exactly the moon I’m asking for,’...
There is a category of novel – The Constant Nymph, The White Hotel, Love Story – which is read by everyone for a while and then sinks into limbo. Have such best-sellers anything in...
Two voices are there of Centennial Professor of English at Vanderbilt University John Halperin, whose rank and area of operation are, by what strikes me as a publishing solecism in a book that...
In 1914 Patrick MacGill’s first novel, Children of the Dead End, sold ten thousand copies in a fortnight. In the same year, Joyce’s Dubliners sold 499 copies, 120 of them bought by...
A year or two ago, Geoffrey Hartman urged literary critics to declare their independence. They should not regard criticism as an activity secondary to the literature it addressed, but as an art...
If the houses in Wyeth’s Christina’s World and Mallick’s Days of Heaven are triremes, yes, triremes riding the ‘sea of grain’, then each has a little barge in tow...