Waftage: An Irregular Ode All my mates were out of town that lunk July and though we shared a bed still it was over – she’d paid the rent till August first so each bum hour those...
A prefatory note testifies that Empire of the Sun draws on its author’s observations as a young boy swept up by the Japanese capture of Shanghai, and his subsequent internment in Lunghua...
In 1929 Wilson Knight wrote an essay ‘Myth and Miracle’ which deeply impressed T.S. Eliot. So deeply, in fact, that Eliot offered to persuade the Oxford University Press to publish...
In 1969 I had a letter from a producer in BBC Radio saying he’d fished out an old script of mine from the pool and thought it might have possibilities for a radio play. I liked the idea of...
This is a complicated novel but a simple story. Kate is having an affair, has been for years, with Jake. It seems to be over: He knew that she had left him when she began to smoke again ......
The plan Myers adopted of framing a discussion of 20th-century people and their problems in Akbar’s India is vindicated by the freshness the novel has in this reissue fifty years after it...
The most interesting parts of the lives of writers often enough take place before they become writers. In Colin MacInnes’s case, one might say that some of the most interesting parts of his...
When Isaac Bashevis Singer won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978, not everyone was gratified. Clive Sinclair begins The Brothers Singer with a quotation from a BBC radio interview broadcast...
Philosophers are understandably aggrieved when literary critics presume to instruct them in the finer points of textual interpretation. Particularly irksome is the claim of conceptual...
When Doctor Johnson defined a club as ‘an assembly of good fellows meeting under certain conditions’ he did not mention the essential condition – that each member shall...
Faber – Faber have published a very good anthology of parodies. This is not it. The superiority of Dwight Macdonald’s old enduring anthology to Simon Brett’s new ephemeral one...
Let’s begin with ‘Let’s begin with the tea towel.’ Thus Professor Curl Skidmore, narrator of C.K. Stead’s All Visitors Ashore, announcing his presence in a text...
The fourth volume of the Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy opens with a recommendation for Mr Harry Pouncy, ‘Lecturer and Entertainer’, of Dorchester, apparently with a view to his...
There’s news about oil on Radio Eireann: Exxon’s profits are up 30 per cent. And the Pope will not, it now appears, visit the North. Too many problems of security. I prefer the news...
‘We’re certain it must be his,’ the phone call had said. The day was hot. You could see the excavator from a mile away as it crouched on the flatland, a giant locust of yellow...
A few weeks ago I gave a lecture at Reading, to a Conference of Higher Education Teachers of English. My visit was brief, but long enough to reinforce my sense that teaching English has become a...
I step into the autumn morning like a first Communicant and ride off down the lane, singing. Across the frosty fields someone is mending fences knock knock knock and a twig that’s caught in...
The tradition of the Commedia del’Arte is apparent in all three of these novels. A repertory company of stock characters is presented to an audience already familiar with many of the masks,...