Synge’s origin was solidly Anglo-Irish, Protestant, upper-middle class: his father a well-got barrister, his mother the daughter of a Protestant parson in Schull, County Cork. Presumably it...
It is not the easiest thing to discuss a novel that is the fourth of a series of five. Sebastian is not properly intelligible without an acquaintance with its predecessors, Monsieur (1974), Livia...
Roy Campbell has been dead for twenty-five years, and in that time his reputation, such as it was, has faded almost entirely away (I can quote only one of his poems from memory – the...
Where is the man who does not feel his heart softened ... [by] these so helpless and so perfectly innocent little creatures? Cobbett When the trees have given up snowberries come into their...
The Brownlows Were loyal and steadfast, like granite against the sea: ‘The only thing that ran in our family was the greyhound.’ The Marriage of Strongbow and Aoife I might as well be...
Opera and opera-going proliferate at very strange times. The opera revival of the last decade is a matter of considerable interest, since in some ways it seems so inappropriate, so profligate,...
‘All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ The second part, at least, of Tolstoy’s celebrated dictum is borne out by Angus...
The William stories – of which the first four are now reissued – came out over a span of fifty years. When they started, in 1919, women were still sniffing sal volatile and when they...
‘Contemplating a worn piece of green velvet on her dressing table, I felt my whole being dissolve in love. I have never ceased to love her from that moment.’ The person who said that...
Ada Leverson (1862-1933) said she had learned about human nature in the nursery. A little brother got her to help him make a carriage out of two chairs, but when he was taken out in a real...
The majestic new Bollingen edition of Coleridge’s collected works edges, with the Biographia Literaria edited by James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate, a bit past its halfway point. Nine of...
Tales of the supernatural have come a long way over the past two decades. When Fontana published their collections of ‘Great Ghost Stories’ in the early 1960s, it might have seemed as...
As a unified, organised state England has a very long history indeed – more than a thousand years of continuous existence, so far. This, writes James Campbell, is the defining contrast...
Campaign Fever We woke drugged and naked. Did our flowers rob us and beat us over the head while we were asleep? They were competing for the same air as us – the thick, vegetable breath of...
Elizabeth Hardwick’s terms for the mind at work are revealing. In an essay called ‘Domestic Manners’ which begins with the question ‘How do we live today?’ she...
The ancient Greeks, for all the changes that the industrial age has brought, would have been quick to understand what we now mean by pollution. The oil slick on the white sand beach, the exhaust...
(for Peter Porter) I The maroon-hued slugs swallow the garden down. Out at sea the ships on fire with light Like burning soldiers drawn up on parade. I switch on the electric light; It is a...
‘I dislike the cult of dreams,’ Sarah Ferguson declares. ‘They should be secret things, and people who are always telling you of what they have dreamt irritate me. Nor do I like...