This is not, as the title might at first suggest, a critical biography, but a collection of miscellaneous essays by MacCarthy, all of which have been collected before, and a memoir by Lord David...
My parcel was delivered to the college Thoroughly packaged, like an only child ... I tear my father’s beautifully-written note (Please acknowledge receipt, Love Mum & Dad) Then fold the...
Loder, the Fifth Form Cad, is being blackmailed by Hogg, the new School Butler: unless Loder gives Hogg £10, Hogg will go to the Head and report Loder for smoking and drinking in the Saloon...
Dostoevsky in the 1840s, a caustic and iconoclastic rising star, was the subject of Joseph Frank’s first volume of biography and critique, The Seeds of Revolt. This volume stood out from...
The Party in the Woods I Each fly a little Isis, A transformer, buzzing; The trees worried by their wolf, The wind. The spring of water, An almost silent work, continuing Under the threshold of...
This is the second and final volume of Hilary Spurling’s biography of I. Compton-Burnett, and it comes to us ten years after the first. During this interval has Mrs Spurling been attending...
When poets decide to write in prose, and a fortiori to undertake so substantial a piece of prose writing as a novel, they are apt to leave unmistakable traces of their poetic craft. Indeed a...
As I begin to write this, innumerable other reviews are being born. Some are being word-processed in paper-free offices, others handwritten in the Club lounges of intercontinental jets and others...
They are not writing the letters, they are looking at Peter’s yellow hat and red socks. (Exercise 3) Naturally this requires their full attention: the hat, a small but rakish panama...
My gesture towards Finnegans Wake is deliberate. Ronald Bush, T. S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style The gesture towards Finnegans Wake was deliberate. It was not accidental. Years of...
On Good Friday 1984, I found myself laying a wreath at the Monument to the Unknown Soldier in Baghdad. This was to me extraordinary. I belong to the Church of England and have no wish to take...
A sheep nibbling earth’s firstlings is my spirit that prays for the day Christ may stoop me as a cooper denies his timber’s nature – for two years in this windy eye of God I...
Seen from a helicopter or from an aeroplane the garden appeared to be no more than a green shape amid arid country where there was a reservoir and quarries and a private airstrip. Just beyond the...
Thirty hours’ drive west of Chicago, out beyond the Dakotas, on the far side of Montana, you come to Red Lodge – a small cowboy town at the foot of the Rockies, special in nothing...
Shut off from more immediate contact with others, the ailing Elizabeth Barrett Barrett was a prodigious correspondent – as these three heavy volumes amply testify. Like one of...
One of H.G. Wells’s abiding obsessions was the fear that the ‘woman of the future’ would bring about ‘race suicide’ by refusing to bear children: which may be a...
Jean Rhys always said, and certainly believed, that she didn’t want to be a writer. She only wrote, she said, because she was unhappy, and when she was happy, as she was in her twenty years...
A couple of years ago there was one of those Barry Humphries TV specials in which the Australian entertainer teases an audience of notables to the edge of humiliation. The guests attend to the...