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...
It would be easy to overpraise Dangerous Pursuits. This is a comedy of surveillance, dealing with in-store video monitors, hardware and software, amateur and professional police espionage,...
Who was cast out of heaven But is alive in me. A certain Ghost dangles foaming in his jaw. My tongue licks my palate And the big shed of my jaws Distils. The head of beer Pocked like the Moon in...
Unlike the publication in 1975 of the touching acute letters of Cyril Connolly to Noel Blakiston, the publication of Connolly’s Journal (1928-1937) does not serve him, except right. He...
It is an entertaining and rewarding experience to look at the reissue of Nina Bawden’s George beneath a Paper Moon immediately before her most recent novel, The Ice-House. A decade...
James Thurber’s best-known cartoon has an impassive little man introducing his spouse to a dazed friend with ‘That’s My First Wife Up There, and This Is the Present Mrs...
My Father at Fifty Your mysterious economy blows the buttons off your shirts, and permits overdrafts at several foreign banks. – It must cost the earth. Once I thought of you virtually as a...
Richard Rorty has made us familiar with the distinction between two sorts of philosophy, which he calls ‘systematic’ and (I think infelicitously) ‘edifying’. The first...