Reflections of a spotlit mirror-ball, Casting a light net over a pearl pond In oval orbits, magnify my haul Of small fry at a disco, coiled in sound. On anti-clockwise tracks, all shod with...
Terry Eagleton’s books have been getting shorter recently. It is eight years since he offered to re-situate literary criticism on the ‘alternative terrain of scientific...
Of books darkened by being posthumous, this one of Empson’s, Using Biography, is among the most illuminatingly vital. Every page is alive with his incomparable mind, his great heart, and...
Anyone who has had experience of the sad and subtle ways in which human beings torment one another under licence of family ties will appreciate the merits of A.B. Yehoshua’s A Late Divorce....
In her first public writing after her elopement with George Henry Lewes in 1854, George Eliot compared the position of women in England and in France: ‘in France alone the mind of woman has...
‘That Enchanter, Manny Forbes ... spell-binding ... the most saintly spirit ... very bizarre’. So I.A. Richards, in 1973, of his old Cambridge colleague, nearly forty years dead....
Two events of the last year have attracted a lot of notice. One is the production of Michael Hastings’s play, Tom and Viv, and the other the publication of Peter Ackroyd’s biography,
My father still reads the dictionary every day. He says your life depends on your power to master words. Arthur Scargill, Sunday Times, 10 January 1982 Next millennium you’ll have to...
The astonishing importance of Leavis in the English academic consciousness does not seem to be a passing fad. The scandal-maker of the 1930s became, by a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, part of...
Little One Too Many – Born at the bottom of the heap. The baby daughter’s doll. She trailed after the others, lugging him. Little One Too Many grew up With a strangely wrinkled brow...
The Arts Council is weeding its garden. It is taking steps, as many institutions have had to do over the last few years, to effect economies and redundancies. Operas, orchestras, spectacles for...
‘Be careful not to spill it when it pops. He’d bloody crucify me if he caught us.’ We had taken months to get to this, our first kiss a meeting of stalagmite and stalactite. The...
With V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) to his credit so far, Thomas Pynchon, American of no known address, is possibly the most accomplished writer of...
The strange unpasteurised heights, And that excellent suntanned all-copper Waterworks sticker mechanism With plastic ballcocks sucking at them And snowflake zinc tanks sunk high Into the arteries...
Two truths are told, as alternative prologues to the action of modern Wales. The first draws on the continuity of Welsh language and literature: from the sixth century, it is said, and thus perhaps the...
These are some extracts from a diary I kept in 1978 while rehearsing and filming a series of six plays for London Weekend Television. Some of the plays were shot on film, some in the studio. If I...
On 24 March 1928 Charlotte Mew killed herself by drinking a bottle of disinfectant in a nursing-home near Baker Street. She left behind her a volume of poems, a number of uncollected essays and...
Orwell took little care of his manuscripts. He didn’t anticipate that collectors of such things would pay real money for them, and that universities would think it a privilege to turn a...