Frank Kermode’s review of the new Gissing biography (page 9) brings to mind a project which I have long thought someone ought to tackle: a fearless update of New Grub Street. The job...
She pushes back her hair behind her ears As I have seen her do over the years Staring beyond me with a slaty gaze While she talks about an experiment On the child’s sense of times and...
Acid rain from the Ruhr strips one pine in three ... To supplement their living, the neutral Danes let out their houses during the summer months – exposure, convexity, clouds and the...
The books listed below have been my leisure reading for many weeks, and I have a glimmering as to what it is that prompts the converted to claim so much for Gissing. But my own view, which is...
One way of describing his frightening progress would be to say that he moved from a big island to a smaller island to a tiny one. Then when he reached the tiny one he went to its furthest end and...
Hall of Clothes and Circuses I The rich seaside stones turn to cloth at a word, To magnificent garments, the tweeds of the granite, Felspar woven with mica and buttons of quartz. The whole earth...
The alphabet does happy things. The first entry in the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs is able to give unforced priority to some of the most important properties of proverbs. ‘Absence...
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It looked like a large stove, one of those round stoves which have been superseded by central heating, though those with a sentiment for the past might buy one for old times’ sake.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...