When Sherlock Holmes was seeking to elucidate the mystery of the Six Napoleons, he went on a ten-mile drive from Kensington to Stepney, and Dr Watson records that ‘in rapid succession we...
There are too many myths about Camus. One of the most persistent, first propagated in Britain by Cyril Connolly’s Introduction to the 1946 translation of L’Etranger, was that he...
‘In the summer of the year 1792, the author, then in ill health, had retired to a lonely farm-house between Porlock and Linton ...’ Coleridge At first, there was no cause for...
The unnamed narrator of John Banville’s novel is an academic who spends the summer on a run-down country estate in Ireland where he hopes to put the finishing touches to a book on Isaac...
Simone de Beauvoir had to change her original title for When things of the spirit come first, because it had been unexpectedly pre-empted by the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. The new...
The Arvon Foundation’s 1980 Anthology contains four splendid poems: Stephen Watts’s ‘Praise Poem for North Uist’, and Keith Bosley’s ‘Corolla’; Aidan...
My old eyes tell me they are offering claret!What a most marvellous, unheard-of prize!Alas! dementia sapiens non caret*Poetic fame in such a Bacchic guise!Much money too! A poet in a garretno...
During her lifetime Charlotte Mew was either greatly liked or greatly disliked, and now, more than fifty years after her death, those who are interested in her are very much interested. There are...
You may not have noticed it, but this has been an important month in the shaping of our more low-grade literary values. Or so it says in the brochure in front of me: ‘Do you want to know...
In what is by far the most rewarding item in Calder’s New Writing and Writers 19, the main character of Harry Mulisch’s ‘Antique Air’ thinks of the war as ‘an almost...
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...