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...
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...