‘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...
Changes in temperature entail turmoil. Petits pois palpitate before they boil. Ponds on the point of freezing look like oil And God knows what goes on below the soil. God and the naturalists, who...
There is a seaside resort in New South Wales, with a ferry connection to Sydney. In 1788 it was named Manly Cove by a state governor, impressed by the proud bearing of the aborigines. They seem...
Pisa Oscura You know how images keep coming back, The lifted arm before the heart attack, Yet out of all the basket-work of shapes And plots, those vandalised electroscapes Of daytime dreaming,...
The Great War was the war of the great war poets. Was ‘the war to end all wars’ also the war to end all war poetry? The best part of Jon Stallworthy’s introduction to his Oxford...
At first sight Janet Morgan does not seem the obvious person to choose as the official biographer of Agatha Christie. She describes herself on the jacket of the book as a ‘writer and...
Every so often, formal early literature permits us a glimpse into the life of the non-literate common people going about their daily business. There’s the snatch of conversation in Henry...
When I see yet another work of hagiography concerning Sir John Betjeman, it makes me want to vomit! Show me, I want to say, please, the ‘geography’ of the house!1 But Betjeman...
The longevity of artists creates special difficulties for their critics. Ideally, from a critical point of view, artists ought to follow Keats’s example and die young, leaving behind a tidy...
(with apologies to Craig Raine) Caxtons are bred in batteries. If you take one from its perch, a girl Must stun it with her fist before you bring it home. Learning is when you watch a conjurer...
They come each evening like virgins to a well: the girls queuing for the xerox-machine, braceleted and earmarked, shapely as pitchers in their stretch Levis or wraparound shirts, sylphs from the...
John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, one of the original ‘amorous sons of Wadham’, perhaps took part in writing an obscene farce called Sodom. Dr Walker drily observes that ‘to...