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...
Toward the end of their correspondence, which spanned years 1851-79, John Ruskin, who hitherto had addressed Thomas Carlyle more or less in terms of deferential formality (‘Dear Mr...
I thought I saw my mother. There were snaps Of someone else’s children in her hand. A picture that affected me. But then I’d never been to see her very much. Mother of my dreams, who...
Perhaps because of its concentration on people’s circumstances and constraints, the novel is often concerned with freedoms under threat and forms of liberation. The generality...
There are people, birds and mice, other cats, cars. There are trees, flowerbeds, the lawn, paths, fences. There are rooms, stairs, radiators. It would be untrue to say that I have never known...
1 The hawk carries his eye out of swinging altitudes higher than winter. Above his locked feet, hunched in wet feathers, he rages in larches. It is the snow brings him down. Bland snow has...
The trick (he tells me) is to sleep till one O’clock then watch the television.In the corner of his murky bedroom There is always a swirl of colour:T-shirts; smoke...
Six North Africans were playing boules beneath Flaubert’s statue. Clean cracks sounded over the grumble of jammed traffic. With a final, ironic caress from the fingertips, a brown hand...
In Marlowe’s Edward II, the royal favourite Gaveston plans delicious entertainments which ‘may draw the pliant king which way I please’. He will introduce musicians to the...
The Acmeist poet Zenkevich declared in 1911 that when he first met Anna Akhmatova he was struck by her saying that poetry was ‘something organic’, and that she was amused at the idea...
It is a surprise to find Raymond Williams, in the year of his retirement as Professor of Drama at Cambridge, editing a series called ‘Literature in History’. In a writing career that...
Those who said that they loved us are terribly dead or not quite right in the head or they...