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...
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...