There is a church in Fleet Street, almost opposite El Vino, where Richard Baxter used to preach in 1660. Baxter’s reconciling, ecumenical attitude toward churches and public worship is...
It might be any night these days, when every night is like nothing on earth. Tired with drinking, we long for your riotous children to wear themselves out and shamble off to their beds.Make it be...
Edwin Muir at Leuchars Junction I think of Edwin Muir in the darkness before dawn at Leuchars Junction commuting to the Food Office in Dundee. Where had he lost his way, the track of vision lost...
In a recent review in this paper, Edward Said used the word ‘narrative’ about thirty times. This might have seemed a lot even in the present state of litcritspeak, and even in an...
Was Hugh MacDiarmid a great poet? Was he, as John MacQueen asserts in his Foreword to Catherine Kerrigan’s study, one of ‘the three greatest poets to use English in the 20th...
But for its background in Father and Son the life of Edmund Gosse would hold for us, I imagine, only minor interest today. Here would be simply a success story of a slightly teasing sort, in...
‘Putting on again joyously the hateful harness’. That is how Robert Pinget’s diffident and slightly dotty narrator, Monsieur Songe, describes the process of taking up his pen...
More than most artists, poets are free in their creations. Valéry commented that after – and only after – the poet has spoken does he know what he has said. It is also true, and...
On 4 March it will be ten years since the death of the writer Francis Hope – killed at 34 in the Turkish Airlines DC10 crash outside Paris – and this last week I have been going...
The death of Paul de Man at the age of 64 deprives us of a literary critic whose influence, already immense in the United States and on the Continent, was beginning to be received in England....
Outside a Tent at Babylon, 1909 ‘Are you ready?’ calls the German archaeologist, standing with his back to the sun. ‘We need to see the tent behind you.’ Gertrude Bell...
In English nurseries little boys are known to be made of frogs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails. Little girls, as in my childhood I knew to my cost, are made of sugar and spice. And all...
It’s probably a good thing that we know so little about Shakespeare’s personal life. What biographical information we have concerns leases, wills, marriage lines, property. His...
What is a bibliography? For Bernard Shaw it was a directory whose natural subscribers were to be found among librarians, biographers, critics and occasionally the authors themselves. He regarded...
I’d bought a bit of wild ground. In March it surprised me. Suddenly I saw what I owned. A cauldron of daffodils, boiling gently. It was a gilding of the Deeds – treasure trove!...
Apart possibly from waving hello to the cliff-divers Would the real Tarzan have ever touched Acapulco? Not with a one-hundred-foot vine. Jungle Jim maybe, but the Ape Man never. They played a...
James Wilcox’s charming comedy is set in rural Louisiana, among people who read the Bible in an engagingly amateurish way, associating religion with the conventions about drinking and...
Even in the days of what is now called ‘classical realism’ it was understood that plot, as a human contrivance meant to suggest intelligible causal relations between history-like...