Not since Arnold Bennett, Elizabeth Bowen and Vicki Baum can a novelist have looked so readily for resonance in the name and function of hotels. After his world-beating Freudian serve with The...
Lisa St Aubin de Teran’s The Slow Train to Milan and Clare Boylan’s Holy Pictures share a subject – girls growing up to a world whose language is new to them – which...
Rosamond Lehmann must be one of the most beautiful women ever to have written novels that are worth serious consideration; and one of the most tragic. Wherever one stands on the gamut of...
For three centuries Rochester has been in and out of the pantheon of English poetry, but today we can see more clearly that the romantic image of the lyrical libertine who underwent a spectacular...
‘Be sand not oil in the world’s machine’ recommended Günter Eich. I admire Luddites, objectors, all who sabotage the cogs and gears of a lying culture. Long exile from the...
The Bronze Horseman of Pushkin’s famous poem is Falconet’s equestrian statue of Peter the Great in St Petersburg. It was ordered by Catherine the Great (Petro primo Catharina...
The telephone rang. It had to be Hurricane Harriet. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Hi. Listen, I can’t talk now – ’ ‘You sound funny. Is something the matter? Look,...
In a recent interview, Kurt Vonnegut rated his latest novel, Deadeye Dick, at B-. The gesture is disarming, and no doubt his critics will conclude that he has got it just about right. But if we...
The idea of the painter as a power of nature, an organ of creation in himself, has been as deeply-rooted and long-lasting as anything in the Western legend of the artist. Rubens was every kind of...
Slips from the eye-corner – overtaking Your first thought. Through your mulling gaze over haphazard earth The sun’s cooled carbon wing Whets the eyebeam. Those eyes in their helmet...
Here is a story with a warning. For years past, as I drove from King’s Cross to the Angel, I have noticed St James’s Church, Pentonville, at the top of the hill and have promised...
John Sutherland has produced ‘a calendar following a series of events (mostly trials) from 1960 to the present day’, which deals briefly and brightly with obscenity cases from Lady...
I’ve been having these bad dreams about David Plante recently. Sometimes, I am slumped on the lavatory, glued there by gin and self-pity; sometimes, I am watching The Sound of Music on...
On balance, we should be grateful to the BBC for finding room on its snooker station, over ten successive Sundays, for what the editor of Opera described as France’s long-delayed revenge...
1 Poor thing, perfection; you Came down to it though, at last. Mother-of-pearl! Your lot were done for: not On account of the War, which you Knew made a poet of Ledwidge; But because you would...
Aliza Shevrin has served her apprenticeship as one of the dutiful translators of Isaac Bashevis Singer, along with Ruth Schachner Finkel, Rosanna Gerber, Dorothea Straus et al. She seems no less...
In Roman mythology, the god Terminus presides over walls and boundaries. He expresses the ancient doctrine that human nature is limited and life irredeemably imperfect. Terminus agrees with...
A Dimpled Cloud Cold drool on his chin, warm drool in his lap, a sigh, The bitterness of too many cigarettes On his breath: portrait of the autist Asleep in the arms of his armchair, age...