The disappearance of time, a life as orderly as the formal view with its row of poplars and the sleeping river, which at the mill was brilliance but now has found its level lower, less limber;...
I must begin by declaring an interest. I am quoted twice in The Oxford Book of Death. This gives me a sort of literary immortality, like the poets I had to read – or, on occasion, copy for...
In his book on Flaubert and Madame Bovary, called The Perpetual Orgy (1975) – the title is a phrase of Flaubert’s for the life of writing – Mario Vargas Llosa says what he likes...
Those happy readers who sing hymns of praise to lyrical childhoods, their own, and, by extension, those in their favourite works of fiction, would do well to study Deborah Moggach’s...
1 What a picture! She has tucked her wild-looking chicken under her arm and stares out over what seems to be a mountain pass on a windy day. She is wearing a blue linen dress the colour of...
It was my 53rd birthday and so I strolled, as was my custom, out of my Quanco office into Hyde Park to look at the statue which had been set up on the day of my birth. Curiously enough, the...
I am summoned: a double handclap from my mother’s ivory hands and I fill the silver tureen with pumpkin soup the colour of oranges. I enter on feet of air. Her smile subsides like a wave on...
The book of my enemy has been remaindered/And I am pleased.
Elizabeth Bishop’s great gift was to perfect a way of writing about human procedures and concerns without talking chiefly about human behaviour. Her poems are intelligent, supple, grave and...
The theme of William Trevor’s new novel – his ninth, and that leaves short-story collections out of account – is the murderous entail of Anglo-Irish history, in which, as a Cork...
The Gulkana – where it meets the Copper – Swung out of the black spruce forest, on a pebbly bend, And disappeared into it, Hazed with forest fires that had burned for weeks. Strange...
Dippy-dippy-dation, my operation: How many stitches did you have? Children’s Counting Song Six weeks after being taken to hospital during a severe attack of pancreatitis, I returned there...
Robert Lowell is not difficult to represent as the mad poet and justified sinner of the Romantic heritage. He is the dual personality who breaks the rules, kicks over the traces: he did this in...
Like a Victorian novel, The Philosopher’s Pupil ends with a valedictory coda. Good-bye Emma, good-bye Pearl. They have ‘become (and I predict will steadily remain) fast friends,...
They used to go to Paris when they died. Now good Americans simply shift from one plane of fiction to another, leaving the Dallas of Lee Harvey Oswald, say, for that of J.R. Or so it is suggested...
‘We both know the reasons.’ The mist was thick outside, turning trees in the park to ghosts, making the city noises hollow, condensing where it touched telephone wires, pavements,...
At the end of a recent and refreshingly untypical poem R.S. Thomas, recalling his sea-captain father, addresses him where he lies in his grave: ...
The action of A Dance to the Music of Time comes to the reader by courtesy of Nick Jenkins, that non-participant observer whose presence never seems to make any impact on the endless round of...