The short story emerged as a major form in the 19th century, a by-product of the great Victorian periodical boom. Some years ago a pessimistic literary diagnosis assumed it would wither with its...
It looked like a large stove, one of those round stoves which have been superseded by central heating, though those with a sentiment for the past might buy one for old times’ sake. This one...
I appear like a bird from nowhere. I have a new name. I am as clean as a whistle. I beat the buttermilk in big while bowls until it is smooth. I wash the pearly plates under the tap, and fifty...
For Mrs Thatcher’s visit the Chinese Have laid on a Grade Three official greeting. Which doesn’t mean the bum’s rush or the freeze: She gets an honour guard at the first...
No one can have been more surprised than James Fenton that In Memory of War turned out to be one of the most acclaimed books of 1982. A year ago, used to being told by reviewers that he was a...
A pierrepoint stretch, mid-afternoon; the last two go facing back down the walled street below the chestnuts this still claggy Sabbath. They hold their rifles lightly, like dipped rods, and in a...
The twilight is like a fine rain forcing us home. Under the trees glow the chalky threads of snowdrops at which I stare. Who goes there, the sentry cries. But how can I describe the mastery of...
In the preface to Days of Contempt, André Malraux alerted his readers to the fact that ‘it is the concentration camps that are dealt with here.’ This was in 1935, and the first...
In order to envisage the curious achievement of Emma Tennant’s Queen of Stones, you must first imagine that Virginia Woolf has rewritten Lord of the Flies. Interior monologues and painfully...
‘New’ poetry can mean two things. When Ezra Pound said ‘make it new’ he was willing the advent of Modernism, the birth of a consciousness transformed by the...
John Montague’s Selected Poems reinforce the impression left by his individual volumes: that of a great talent growing increasingly apprehensive at the conditions in which it must be...
I must (deride me not) be somewhere where I can, without disaster, bicycle. Henry James, 4 February 1896 For your internal ears and eyes I give you Celia itemised – in her surfaces as she...
Thrice has Anthony Burgess begun a novel in bed, with intimations of impropriety and guilt. Getting out of the dreadful thing was the problem posed for the bold bigamist of Beds in the East, the...
Horse-chestnuts thudded to the lawn each autumn. Their spiked husks were like medieval clubs, Porcupines, unexploded shells. But if You waited long enough they gave themselves up – Brown...
How perfect they are without your help, these limited editions. How even in winter they seem to shine when you see them, marching ahead of you, dead set on something. Their breasts toss things to...
Sylvia Townsend Warner courageously faced solitude, preferring ‘the sting of going to the muffle of remaining’. The crisis passed, because, STW thought, ‘I was better at loving and being loved,’...
The most charming fact I have stumbled on in intellectual history is that Freud and Shaw were shocked by one another. Freud’s wounded romanticism speaks in his reference (in Group...
After Petros Zarifi’s wife died his shop began to make less and less money. His wife had acted as cashier. That was all over now. The shelves emptied gradually as the unpaid wholesalers...