The flowering of European Jewry in the days before 1914 is a cultural phenomenon comparable to the ‘golden’ periods of national art in Spain, France and England, even to the great...

My mother went with no more warning Than a bright voice and a bad pain. Home from school on a June morning And where the brook goes under the lane I saw the back of a shocking white Ambulance...

When three distinguished literary figures are impelled to write about the Bible, it is clear that this strange library of books has lost nothing of its perennial fascination. All three grapple...

I remember very clearly a visit to the art college in Nanking in April 1976. The suffocating presence of Jiang Qing (Mao’s wife and aesthetic dictator of the day) could be felt almost...

‘What are days for?’ asks a poem in The Whitsun Weddings. It’s a good opening line, with that abruptness and immediacy most Larkin openings have. And it’s a good question,...

‘… her measures are, how well Each syllabe answered, and was formed, how fair; These make the lines of life, and that’s her air. ’ Jonson A Lob accent pucking in the...

There are no Departments of Literary Criticism; and even proposals to have a Criticism question in official examinations can cause turbulence in academic circles. What is at stake? By now, of...

November was always mud. Crossing a ploughed field our feet grew footballs of clay; matted with leaves its crust dropped on bootroom floors. Its odour was sharp and cold as a rocket’s...

Foot plumps for Aslef but as if in spite The TUC does not and the strike’s broken. Foot’s coiffe should go a purer shade of white Unless his fiery gesture was a token To make him look...

There were reports in the papers two years ago concerning identical twins, Freda and Greta Chaplin, who had been had up at York for making a nuisance of themselves, and who seemed like creatures...

When wing to wing, feather by feather, the rooks were piecing night together, I took the ring the iron-lipped iron-lidded lion gripped and tapped the call-sign on his hide. He knew me, nodded,...

Beckett our contemporary – readers and audiences undoubtedly respond to him as a contemporary – is all the same very much a creature of the Twenties. He is the last great Modernist....

The President’s Child works, effortlessly, on many levels. First, it is a political thriller. Isabel Rust, a television producer and former hack reporter, once had an affair with a man who...

I The deal table where he wrote, so small and plain, the single bed a dream of discipline. And a flagged kitchen downstairs, its mote-slants of thick light: the unperturbed, reliable ghost-life...

There has been an abundance of good critical writing about Thomas Hardy, from Lionel Johnson in 1894 to our own day, but his biography has been in a curious condition from the start. The...

There occurred recently the first successful prosecution of videotapes under the Obscene Publications Act. As far as one can tell, the offending material had more to do with violence and cruelty...

The first four books would normally be described as literary criticism, though they exhibit a considerable variety of interests, sociological, historical, theoretical; in Harold Bloom’s...

‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’ Perhaps rather carefully, the words at the head of Graham Greene’s new novel are ascribed to William Shakespeare...