Christina Rossetti wrote ‘If I had words’ and ‘I took my heart in my hand’ and ‘If he would come today, today’ and ‘What would I give for a heart of...
The old year ends with Cambridge under snow. The world in winter like the Moon in spring Unyieldingly gives off a grey-blue glow. An icy laminate caps everything. Christmas looks Merry if you...
Kawai’s Trilby Cold comforts of a hotel room: the air-conditioning and fridge join forces for a chummy hum, barbershop-style. Poised on the edge of bed, I think how far I’ve come. Two...
Milan Kundera says of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting that ‘it is a novel about Tamina, and whenever Tamina is absent, it is a novel for Tamina.’ He says this in the novel, in...
In a letter to Cyril Connolly in 1948 Evelyn Waugh listed the ideas that had been in his mind when he was at work on The Loved One: immediately after ‘over-excitement with the scene at...
Jacques Derrida once defined his intellectual project with the aid of an image from the Biblical story of Jonah and the Whale. It was a question, he suggested, of ‘vomiting up’...
As he was setting the insect in resin He thought he could hear the singular buzz of its flight, As if the creature had turned up the volume at its death On a million entrapped wingbeats, clipped...
She comes into the garden to take the washing in. She raises her arms to her husband’s shirts like a worshipper, and then she makes a lovely pile of them. Wings, sails, copes, you are...
Two characters in pursuit of their author: such are George Neville and Witter Bynner, two chunks of raw material, anxious to tell the world about their cook. George Neville went to school with...
Once there was Grayzo and me, now there is only me. By twelve, when servants have closed the bar and gone wherever they go to sleep, the Club is my own. I am drunk as usual tonight, weaving my...
If there ever was a writer of genius, or neargenius – time will decide – who was heart-cloven and split-minded it is Elizabeth Bowen. Romantic-realist, yearning-sceptic,...
‘Cowper came to me and said: “O that I were insane always. I will never rest. Can you not make me truly insane? … You retain health and yet are as mad as any of us all –...
Denis Donoghue begins, a little self-indulgently, by reprinting six short BBC talks on ‘Words’. The excuse is that such radio talks offer a simple if incomplete model for...
The survivors are two Jewish families, the Katzes and the Gordons, fled from Odessa and settled in pre-First World War Liverpool. Within their ethnic class and shared past they are markedly...
I always had this theory about Romania. Well, not a proper theory: more an observation, I suppose. Have you ever realised how, in various fields, Romania has managed to produce one – but...
At first it was only an imperceptible quivering of the skin – ‘As you wish’ – where the flesh is darkest. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ – Nothing. Milky...
There was a time when local or regional poetry was greeted and respected as a romantic phenomenon: its origins far from the literary vortex of the metropolis were the guarantee of authenticity,...
Sing the hole’s plume, the rafter’s cockade Who melts from the eye-corner, the soft squealer Pointed at both ends, who chews through lead Sing the scholarly meek face Of the penniless...