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...
There is a point in Stanley Middleton’s Blind Understanding at which a man does not eat a dry biscuit. Listening to the sound of the nine o’clock television news from the distance of...
My first thought was that this whole enterprise is definitely incongruous. A birthday party for Philip Larkin is like treating Simone Weil to a candlelit dinner for two at a restaurant of her choice....
Iggy Blaikie, Kayo Obermark, Sam Zincowicz, Kotzie Kreindl, Clara Spohr, Teodoro Valdepenas, Clem Tambow, Rinaldo Cantabile, Tennie Pontritter, Lucas Asphalter, Murray Verviger, Wharton Horricker...
Rotund and acrobatic tits explored Bud-studded branches on our tallest birch tree, A picture that came straight from her adored, Delightfully composed chinoiserie. My girl was four weeks dead...
There are grounds for thinking Tony Harrison the first genuine working-class poet England has produced this century. Of course, poets from D.H. Lawrence to Craig Raine can boast a proletarian...
Since a harebrained devil has changed the world To scenes from a Nature Documentary, There are those of us who will forever seek Rational landscapes, dotted with walled cemeteries, Unquestioned...
The original title of Christa Wolf’s novel, Kindheitsmuster, could mean something like ‘a pattern of childhood’, but her translators have rightly gone for a more idiomatic...
Most of my first literary influences – if they can be called such – came from the cinema. I remember some time during the early Forties seeing a film, one of those ‘B’...