These are the years of early fame after Sons and Lovers, and of the publication of The Rainbow and its banning, and of Lawrence’s violent and despairing reactions to the war. He was already...
After a while we saw the addition Our travelling made to the glass of shops. As the shadow of a train goes cheering Itself across the countryside In mockery of continuity, We rode like facetious...
How it hung In the electrical loom Of the Himalayas – I remember The spectre of the rose. All day the flag on the military camp flowed South. In The Shah’s Motel The Manageress...
As fifty thousand people in Warsaw March for Walesa and for Solidarity, They rate, beside the South Atlantic war, The same space as a fun run staged for charity. The Falklands dwarf even El...
The flat was silent except for the steady hiss of the water-heater. It was a sound he was not completely used to yet. Until two months ago, whenever he had wanted to have a bath the primus had...
The Siren’s Song is the first chance English readers have had to experience Maurice Blanchot. If it is the case, as Gabriel Josipovici pre-emptively asserts in his introduction, that...
David Storey’s new novel begins with a brief prelude reminiscent of The Rainbow’s, tracing the historical mutations of a locality from its natural to its urban (here 1930s) condition....
Now the Conference stands up to sing About the blood that dyed the scarlet banners, Face after flushed face lauding a vampire king. At church service this morning all the sinners Were...
‘Sacrilege sanctifies.’ Under this heading Brecht cheerfully sums up what happens to plays, like Shakespeare’s, that outlast their own time – and what may now be happening...
Two months after Tennyson’s death Burne-Jones was reluctantly following the instructions of the poet’s widow and son in repainting the portrait of Tennyson as a young man which now...
‘A way into secrecy frisked a pampered mouse’ – a curdled Georgian sentence that leads one straight into one of Walter de la Mare’s most plain and chilling tales about a...
Wolfgang Hildesheimer has certainly been around a lot. Born in Hamburg in 1916, he belongs to that generation of Germans whom fortune first inexorably divided into victims and perpetrators and...
‘There was a story that began –’ begins Sabbatical, and the story is then interrupted for two nights and a day by a storm at sea, itself interrupted by a dialogue on...
My grandmother Ada Leverson imagined that the height of bliss would be to sit in a theatre listening to her own dialogue spoken by ‘real live actors’, and much of her life was spent...
My ghostly Mother, I me confess I’ve been indecent, more or less. Lapses of courage are always indecent. You had a greyer time, in which was lent The social way to lie. It was not meant...
for Robert Conquest Exotic stimulations! Our passions pulled so loose From anything we might Share with our congeners, Why should we not refuse Their craven fabrications? Conquest (what a name...
In the past, I have been persuaded by those like Colin Falck who have thought Thom Gunn’s distinctive and great achievement was to have re-established creative connections with at least one...
No Australian poet before Christopher Brennan was fully conscious of the artistic problem posed by isolation from Europe, and no Australian poet since has been fully disabled by it....