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...
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...
The French Enlightenment? Think of Huber’s famous picture of the dîner des philosophes: there is Voltaire, one arm raised to heaven, and alongside him, around the well-provided table,...
The pike has been condemned. The Virgin, dipping her lily in the lough, decreed it. This is no precinct for anything fishy That revives the underhang of the Dragon. He fell asleep in Job. He woke...
It was surprising to see the resemblances between Her Victory and This Earth of Mankind. Alan Sillitoe’s new novel is about 50-year-old Britons feeling rootless. Pramoedya Ananta Toer is...
She lay mute as an Old Testament sacrifice; nothing so abundant as a thicket – but barbed wire, a secular parallel, the sheep had snagged her horn on, days before judging by the jaundiced...
When John Berryman’s first full-length collection of poems, The Dispossessed, was published in 1948, Yvor Winters wrote a notice of it for the Hudson Review. Here Winters drew attention to...
These ‘Critical Heritage’ volumes on T. S. Eliot get off to a bad start, and persevere. The chosen items are ‘printed verbatim’, ‘apart from the silent correction of...
Stephen Leacock, the English-born, Canadian-reared humorist, has a single entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations: ‘Lord Ronald ... flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in...
Universally acclaimed as the pioneer of the modern detective-thriller, Hammett died in 1961, yet this is the first full-length account of his life to appear. In the context of the continuing...
Byron is one of the first international successes of the literature industry. From the Renaissance on, sculptors and painters could get into the big money in any of the richer economies of Europe;...
Love jumped on us before we knew his name, twisted our arms at prep schools, hid up our mothers’ skirts, oh! we were bent by knitted bosoms and that ladylike scent! Love was a tyrant in his...
Sebastian Venable, the poet as pervert in Suddenly Last Summer, claimed as new and personal an old and decadent dictum now rephrased to suit the stage: ‘The life of the poet is the work of...