In Polish ears, the surname Norwid, and the Christian names Cyprian, Kamil, Ksawery, Gerard, ring alien, aristocratic, proud. Associated with the artist’s profession, they suggest a darling...
The facts of Denton Welch’s brief life are fairly well known, partly of course because they were his sole subject-matter as a writer. He was born in 1915, the youngest of three brothers,...
My dear son, You wrote me a letter you never sent. It wasn’t for me – it was for the whole world to read. (You and your instructions that everything should be burned. Hah!) You were...
Unwinding If the twine unravels to the very end the stuff gathering under my fingernails is being picked off whitewash at the bedside. And the stuff gathering in my ear is their sex-pruned and...
Peter Prince’s admirable novel, The Good Father, is about a group of professional-class people in the London Borough of Lambeth, trying to see themselves as liberal and left-wing. They were...
A small ad in Private Eye seeks a companion ‘sexy, feminine and discrete’. Siamese twins, I suppose, need not bother to apply. It is harder to divine why this translation of...
Of these novels, the one with legs and a long finish, as the wine-tasters say, is Graham Swift’s Waterland, his third. The story – which is at once story and history, erzählung...
‘Australia?’ There was a punishing stress on the second syllable and the tone was one of idle disbelief: ‘But why?’ This was over seven years ago. I had just been invited...
Semiotics is a fashionable subject, but semioticians do not normally become international best-sellers, which is the fate that, in apparent violation of this familiar cultural assumption, has...
Your daughter Kate saw the ghost the same summer night your twin came for her visit. I had been happy, before, always to leave my place in your bed for the twin to take it, but this time...
My subject-matter is subject-matter. Is it true, as it sometimes seems, that certain subjects are inevitably more interesting than others, however much we may protest that they are merely...
The poet Blok once wrote about the ‘gloomy roll-call’ in Russian history of tyrants and executioners, ‘and opposite them a single bright name – Pushkin’. Quite true....
The facing mirrors showed two rooms Which rhymed and balanced beautifully, So everything we wore and ate Shone doubly clear for you and me. In the next image after that Life seemed the same in...
Our colleague, Ernest Old, expounds To first year ‘kids’ upon Metadiegetic discourse In Dickens and in Donne. He thinks he’ll make a Chair before...
From Anne Edwards’s biography of Margaret Mitchell, we know that Peggy Mitchell had ‘sailor-blue eyes’. We also know that she stood four feet eight, which is mighty small for...
Lewis Dabney, editor of the Portable Edmund Wilson, makes the slightly surprising claim that Wilson’s ‘reputation continues to grow’. I had supposed that it was, at least...
‘When once you have thought of big men and little men, it is very easy to do all the rest,’ said Dr Johnson of Gulliver’s Travels. This might do for a put-down of Swift, whom...
Four titles, and an abstract noun apiece – well, Melvyn Bragg has two, but it’s the well-known coupling as in (exactly as in, that’s rather the trouble) a fight for...