Until recently, the only Saki story I had ever read was ‘Filboid Studge, the Story of a Mouse that Helped’. This is the one about the artist Mark Spayley who is wooing the daughter of...
Rabbit novels come out at the turn of each decade, like a series of reports on the state of America. Rabbit is rich, the third and latest, takes place in Brewster, Pennsylvania, from June 1979...
When Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth was published in 1933 it struck a deep chord among those in England who felt, as she did, that their youth had been ‘smashed up’ by the...
In the noisy polemical atmosphere of contemporary literary criticism, Geoffrey Strickland’s quiet ‘thoughts on how we read’ may not have got a fair hearing. His book is an...
George Eliot called her last novel Daniel Deronda, so that to separate part of it off for publication* under another title than her own might seem to be challenging the judgment, the deliberate...
Here they live and are themselves for there is nothing else to be; it is a land for gentlemen. They do not speak here of the beauty all around them, being labouring class and used to burdens. And...
Ian McEwan’s tale is as economical as a shudder. It never itself shudders, which is one reason why it makes you do so. By staying cool in the face of the murderous madness which it...
In his history of the genre, Brian Aldiss suggests that most SF is what he calls ‘prodromic’: we must read it less as a prophecy of the future than as symptomatic of the present. By...
Henry James writes of a very grand lady that she had ‘an air of keeping, at every moment, every advantage’. Paradoxically, the same would be true of the literary personality of Elias...
Bony skeletons in coffinwood, some of them bad, some of them good, all of them silent, stretched out straight, hope to get in at Heaven’s Gate. Some had breasts to drive men wild or (more...
Dear Britain, Merry Christmas! If I may Presume on your attention for the space Of one broadsheet, I’d simply like to say How pleased I am to see your homely face Perked up and looking...
Just why the publication of this expensive book should have merited a subsidy from the Scottish Arts Council is not obvious. Much of the text has the disjointed irrelevance of the Walrus talking...
Was Hamlet present at Bruno’s lectures before giving up University as a job-lot of scoundrels and charlatans, leaving Wittenberg for a court grown purulent? He found himself unemployed, at...
1980 was certainly the year of the Poles. With Solidarity Poland was making history, for once without tragedy, or at least not immediate tragedy. The first-ever Polish pope was riding in triumph...
The title page of this book tells us that it is ‘published to commemorate the centenary of Sir Charles Tennyson, the poet’s grandson and biographer, born 8 November 1879, died 22 June...
This is no country for young women – the old on one another’s arms, ice in the air, etcetera ... Cheap-rate, off-peak, out-of-season, they come in charabancs – coaches too new a...
Two middle-class men talking. Call them Charles and Henry. CHARLES: And did you have to go through that tedious charade, sexual intercourse? HENRY: (enthusiastically) Oh yes. From A to Z....
One of John Osborne’s Thoughts for 1954: ‘The urge to please above all. I don’t have it and can’t achieve it. A small thing but more or less mine own.’ This book...