The minute Dornford Yates was dead in 1960, the mating calls of envy and resentment were heard hissing over the bier. The smelly little judgments which they spawned are now grown great and...
The first of Julian Symons’s ‘original investigations’, entitled ‘How a hermit was disturbed in his retirement’, is an apocryphal Sherlock Holmes story in which the...
This year brings the centenary of Trollope’s death. On the whole, the anniversary has been taken calmly by his countrymen: with far less celebration than, for instance, George Eliot...
A tube of Pro-Plus Rapid Energy Tablets gave me Extra Vitality when I visited my girlfriend on her father’s stud. The double-backing local bus took two hours to travel twenty miles. When it...
William Golding is evidently a bit fed up with being the author of Lord of the Flies. It was greeted with proper applause when it came out in 1954, but soon became the livre de chevet of American...
In the slovenly laboratory we call Society sometimes a poet will crawl – Great big unsupervised baby – up the wall And from a bottle on the topmost shelf Marked Danger, Do Not Touch,...
Many academic teachers of English are at the moment united in the dismayed recognition that their subject is in a state of acute crisis. Some nourish the suspicion that English literature...
The title poem of St Kilda’s Parliament is about a local institution ‘quite unlike Westminster’, a gathering ‘by interested parties to discuss the day’s work and any...
In Lincoln Museum The rock-tree underground Moving its boughs slowly, The sky-blue flintfruits Rising in the soil Gradually like sealed firmaments; Knapped open they show Blue and cloudy white; Or...
‘He is stuck on himself. It isn’t all that easy to see why. He is, after all, only a literary journalist.’ Clive James hardily dispatches someone who is a television celebrity...
Sitting in Waterlow Park the other afternoon, I heard a park keeper ask an old lady with a transistor, ‘What is happening in the Cup Final?’ – to which the old lady replied:...
James Scavanger had first met the woman who would become his wife on a Thursday afternoon at the Tomb of the Unknown Celebrity, where she did the floors. As she had approached him through the...
This book is mad, of course. Admirable but mad – to abduct Sartre’s own phrase about Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. A work of elucidation couched in a lazily dense style; a biography...
In hospital it’s earlier than you think. All day the daylight lighting lights the day That five times brings by trolley a hot drink, Bovril, Nescafé, Ovaltine, or tea. The...
On 14 December 1978 small groups of people loomed out of the Kenya highland mist, as they headed down the narrow path churned into mud by the police truck which had brought Ngugi wa Thiongo home...
Somewhere among wires and chimneys, the skill of a songbird starts. His practice is to fill his gizzard with flies and sing all he knows. His song is a game played with stones, the play of water...
By the Western calendar, the events chronicled in Shusaku Endo’s latest novel take place between 1613 and 1624. But of course that is an artificial way of looking at the matter. Half the...
Iris Murdoch’s novels are philosophy: but they are philosophy which casts doubts on all philosophy including her own. She is an author whose project involves an ironic distance not only from her characters...