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...
Among the terms of abuse which J.R.R. Tolkien was accustomed to apply to an Oxford college of which he was (and I am) a member, there is one that makes an odd impression. It is the adjective...
Deconstruction, the subject of six new books reviewed in a recent issue of the American journal the New Republic, must be judged, simply by virtue of the commentary it has generated, an important...
The order in which we read the short stories in a collection makes a difference. Our hopping and skipping out of sequence can often disturb the lines or blunt the point of a special arrangement,...
Marthe Robert is a well-known freelance among French Germanisten. She has written extensively on Freudian theory, on myth and Romanticism, and she collaborated with André Breton on a...
White are the streets in this shabbiest- grown of the world’s great cities, whiter than marshmallow angels. Descending by parachute, one would be arriving in a world long dead. One would...
One evening, declares Jonathan Wordsworth as he begins his new critical book, a poet happened to be walking along a road, when the peasant who was with him pointed out a striking sight: ...
‘What will you tell your children?’ asks the Zipra guerrilla as he says goodbye to Caute and vanishes back into the bush. (The Zimbabwean handshake: hands, thumbs, then hands again.)...
When I took up work in Nigeria, the day after their Independence ceremony of 1960, I had with me two old British books to introduce me to the country – or, at least, to my seniors’...
Quels bons bras, quelle belle heure me rendront cette région d’où viennent mes sommeils? Rimbaud This is the excitement that ends in pain. Dark...
I’d been lying there a hell of a time, and I reckoned, dammit, all those years they’d been writing all those smashing things about me, and why didn’t I get up, yes, just this...
Eagleton’s book is both a primer and a postmortem. It surveys the varieties of recent and present-day literary theory, only to suggest – in its closing chapter – that they had...