The Edwardians, it is well known, were great worriers. If it was not the national physique or the Teuton menace they were worrying about, it was the ‘warped vitality’ of Bank Holiday...
In a middling hour, Wednesday’s raw afternoon of kitchen buildings and a green pitch, my autopod smooths along a metalled slant...
In the opening chapter of A Study in Scarlet Dr Watson is introduced to Sherlock Holmes. Holmes says, ‘How are you?’ and adds: ‘You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.’...
Glowacki’s novel makes trouble for itself. The work is translated – one of the two ways in which, notoriously, a British book can be guaranteed to lose money (the other sure thing is...
‘All the unhurried day,’ Philip Larkin wrote, addressing a long-dead girl who had been drugged and raped in London, ‘Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.’ All that...
On my 70th birthday I was given a lunch at the LSE by some of my younger friends: The party was graced by the presence of Michael Foot and Lord Blake. Soon afterwards Robert Blake struck me off his visiting-list...
Transfiguration is into a kind of poetic absence which includes only the idea of love, not its quotidian betrayals or fulfilments. ‘What remains of us is love’ in the sense that love equates with self-extinction....
Ann Pasternak Slater’s Shakespeare the Director is the best new book on Shakespeare I have read in the last year, and is prefaced by generous tributes to and from the General Editor of the...
The heavenly ruler looked down, noted the inadequacy of Giotto and his successors and decided to dispatch Michelangelo to earth, there to demonstrate perfection in no fewer than four arts...
The loss of the Irish language was tragic and the attempt to revive it has been a farce. Taken together, these two facts have serious implications for modern Irish nationalism in all its...
The Crane Bag is a magazine, published twice a year: each issue deals with one theme. In Irish legend, the crane bag contained the alphabet of knowledge. The bag belonged to Manannan, god of the...
The 19th-century novel was the great forum for writing about life – from sanitation to the condition of women, from politics to love. All the novels reviewed here are very much of the 20th...
Plans have been laid, the land is bought and later this year contractors will start to build, at Southwark, on or near the original site, a replica of Shakespeare’s Globe. It’s an...
In the present climate of polemical exchange one may doubt whether Gabriel Josipovici would take very kindly to being enlisted on the side of ‘literary theory’. Though his essays make...
One day of early winter my friend D, arriving unexpectedly in London, telephoned to ask me to attend the funeral of someone I had never met or heard of – B, the 17-year-old son of a friend...
Wrong Shoes I was eight when I set out into the world wearing a grey flannel suit. I had my own suitcase. I thought it was going to be fun. I wasn’t listening. when everything was explained...
The publication of Patrick Collinson’s The Religion of Protestants is a stirring event in the rediscovery of Early Modern England. Unmistakably the work of a historian who has reflected on...
What great snout of ice Once nosed through this gorge I cannot imagine, but it left Sabrina narrow-waisted for men To span after their fashion. Abraham Darby’s three hundred And eighty tons...