In this small-scale and intimate first collection of stories by Ahdaf Soueif there is a remarkably productive, somewhat depressing tension between the anecdotal surface of modern, Westernised...
Was there ever, in fact, a ‘Cambridge English’? Not as in ‘Oxford English’, which refers in its most general use to a manner of speaking: but in the sense of a distinctive...
‘What a chapter of chances,’ Tristram Shandy’s father says, ‘what a long chapter of chances do the events of this world lay open to us!’ The thought is echoed in the...
The less there is to see, the more there is to say. Such might be the motto of the Beckett enthusiast. An ingenious recent article by James Hansford devotes almost twenty pages to a story whose...
Most novels, if they come off, are orgies of self-congratulation, shared between the writer and the reader, who unconsciously understand both what is going on and what is needed. To enjoy a novel...
His bushy hair is white and cropped more conservatively than in the past ... his eyes are clear and surprisingly blue. He moves with the grace of the boxer he has sometimes pretended to be ......
With the appearance of Sherston’s Progress in 1936, Siegfried Sassoon completed what Howard Spring, writing in the Evening Standard, called ‘the most satisfying piece of autobiography...
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...