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...
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...