1 You had a month to play with kites, a season to play with water and a night when statues of butter stood frozen on a passing street. You had a government that banned football and mah jongh and...
The trouble with Shakespeare is that he takes the heart out of controversy. Any flat-earther, royalist, republican, anti-abortionist, any Bennite or Thatcherite, will lose whatever fierce...
The imagination is always worth defending, and is usually in need of defence. But it is not always clear what or whom it needs to be defended against. Some might think, for instance, that the...
As Amersham achieves Privatisation And sells the way hot cakes do when dirt cheap We realise with a sickening sensation, As of a skier on a slope too steep, That if the soundest firms owned by...
Lying in bed with a cracked rib, I have been much consoled by these genial books about Wodehouse. The only dangerous one was Wodehouse on Wodehouse, since I was compelled to laugh aloud,...
The voices in A Chain of Voices are those of 30 characters, Boer farmers and their hired labourers and slaves, in the Cape in the early 19th century. The voices are ‘all different yet all...
The Young Rebecca is a collection of the writings of Rebecca West from 1911 to 1917, selected and introduced by Jane Marcus, with just the right amount of explanation and comment. In one respect...
How strong was the fortress of Jewish life when you were young – did it hold up against the invasions of Chicago? I think it broke down very quickly, at least in the Twenties. After the...
Barbara Pym’s posthumous novel, An Unsuitable Attachment, begins with an echo of Pride and Prejudice. Rupert Stonebird, an eligible bachelor, has just moved into a middle-class...
A slow-motion explosion is what my mouth’s become, front teeth thrusting forward at impossible angles. Incisors once in satisfactory alignment cruelly slice through lips and tongue, and...
Nicotine The filter crumples – a cruel exhilaration as the day’s first cigarette draws to a close. The optician’s colours turn to a dizzy whiteness in my solar plexus ... With...
It is not often that a literary critic receives the crown of a collected edition, and if he does he is probably something more than a literary critic. So it is with Lionel Trilling, whose...
‘Robert Burchfield, Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, made a bid to unite two nations divided by a common language by unveiling the Oxford American Dictionary, which includes such...
A biography of Conrad that makes no claim to add to the voluminous information already on record, but runs amiably and quite deftly over the course, may have its uses. Not everybody has the time...
A new novel by Günter Grass invites comparisons of a national kind. If a British writer of fiction wished to engage with the big stories of the day – the kind of thing Brian Walden...
Consciousness has to live, at least notionally, by extremes. It is by turns enthusiastic and cynical, believes and disbelieves. It wants to be snug and comfortable, but its peak moments, when it...
In 1887, Rider Haggard earned more than £10,000 by writing: only 31, he was probably the highest-paid novelist in England. Twelve years earlier, he had been packed off to Natal as an unpaid...
A Letter from Magritte There is a little Indian blood in the veins of the coffee. Yesterday I visited the date on the calendar in a flat in a white house saccharised with religious education. I...