I have had, as a holiday task, to cut the sixty-five-thousand-word P.G. Wodehouse novel Quick Service, published in 1940, down to about twenty-five thousand words for a BBC Radio Book at Bedtime....
1 Above our beds the little wooden shelf with one support was like a crucifix offering up its hairbrush, Bible, family photograph for trial by mockery. We lay in its shadow on summer nights,...
The freedom to juggle with language, Angela Carter suggests, is a promise and perhaps an instrument of other freedoms. Certainly her own cheerful jokes bespeak a lively independence of hallowed...
Landor wrote: ‘Many, although they believe they discover in a contemporary the qualities which elevate him above the rest, yet hesitate to acknowledge it; part, because they are fearful of...
Joyce’s Ulysses was published on his 40th birthday, 2 February 1922, in a limited edition of 1000 numbered copies. The text was full of misprints, as Joyce irritatedly knew. As late as...
‘Dollar bills, pound notes, they’re suicide notes. Money is a suicide note.’ So says John Self, the hero of Money: A Suicide Note, and what he means is that money is destroying
Three years ago, in Loitering with Intent, Muriel Spark returned to the scene of her extraordinary first novel, The Comforters, published in 1957. In The Only Problem she is once again looking...
Logan stood outside the shop which looked like an English funeral parlour, black-painted and all its contents invisible. On the window was inscribed in English in impressive calligraphy LEGAL...
Sex Objects I learned from a friend’s porno mag that men can buy the better class of plastic doll (posh ones are hard and unyielding, not the pneumatic sort that fly from windows when...
I will give you the world, the world we are given: the turban in a tangerine, a snooker table, say, with six suspensory bandages, the lemon squeezer in the men’s urinal. You will need to...
This will be a happy year if everyone who owns a Rabelais gives it a good read. The French have made 1984 ‘L’ Année Rabelais’, treating it as the 500th anniversary of his...
‘This is,’ as Professor Ricks says, in his rather baroque manner, ‘a gathering of essays, not a march of chapters’; each essay ‘attends to an aspect, feature, or...
In memory of Pete Laver ‘To Fleur from Pete, on loan perpetual.’ It’s written on the flyleaf of the book I wouldn’t let you give away outright: ‘Just make it...
Who else would refer in the space of a hundred pages to a newly discovered papyrus of Stesichorus, a Zurich medical dissertation on the fear of being buried alive, and four 19th-century Danish...
To read Virginia Woolf when young is, or was, to have the feeling of entering a new world, to realise with sudden ecstasy that this was true being, where words and consciousness and the solitary...
Hostathion contains Triazophos, Controls seed weevil, pea moth, carrot fly. Of pesticides Hostathion is the boss. Pests take one sip, kick up their heels and die. They never find out what...
Hazlitt is sometimes rather like Walt Whitman, democratic, containing multitudes, yet happy with solitary self-communion. In a pleasant essay called ‘A Sun-Bath – Nakedness’,...
Johnson’s Imlac, urging that the poet neglect the ‘minuter discriminations’ of the tulip leaf in favour of ‘general properties’, has been unpopular for two hundred...