One of the genuinely eerie moments in the recent huge and hollow film about a huge and hollow hotel, The Shining, comes in the late shot where we get a glimpse inside one of the rooms that should...
How do you measure literacy? Hardly – without distorting language in a way that could itself be called illiterate – by quoting the fustian prose or mixed metaphors of a writer you...
For gas the house waters carbide, often meagre for burning, though our lungs cough up a shred of acid that we sicken on. Up at plastered stone, flaky and gravid, the sheep butt: smudged with an...
Ford Madox Ford has been lucky in his admirers, if ‘luck’ is the word. It is no small thing to have inspired two such magnificent poems as Lowell’s ‘Ford Madox Ford’...
William Trevor is bewitched by childhoods and by second childhoods: the ‘grown-up’ bit in between is for him a dullish swamp of lies, commerce, lust and things like that. For Trevor,...
Poetry, Eugenio Montale said in his Nobel Prize address, is not merchandise. On that basis he excused himself for having turned out comparatively few poems. Put together, however, they make a...
There will be many who will find it significant that Anne Whitmarsh, beginning a careful and detailed study of Simone de Beauvoir with a section called ‘Biographical Notes’, should...
Its last chapter apart – an irrelevant ‘After-thought’ whose autobiographical explosion inextricably interweaves deep historical insights with a strong composer’s...
These are the just Who kill unjustly men they call unjust. These are the pure in heart Who see God smeared in excrement on walls. These are the patriots Who starve to give the ravening media...
Matthew Arnold worried that a literary reputation in England, unconfirmed by ‘the whole group of civilised nations’ (by which he meant Europe), might be merely provincial. At the same...
The plural title of Life Stories is paradoxical. The short story – Barker’s preferred literary form – cannot comprehend anything as large as life. In the face of this paradox,...
I was amused some years back to find that the distinguished head of my college used to play the same game as I did when bored by meetings of the Governing Body. He would let his eye move round...
How many books have I read? Two hundred, three hundred, five hundred …? I could compile a list. But what would it tell me? What I know? What I have forgotten? What I was? What I wanted to...
Austria Seventeen languages under the thumb of one, and that not even German. The Habsburgs. The blind, glassy double-windows are flytraps. Their yellow barracks – justice, education,...
Vladimir Voinovich’s Pretender to the Throne is a continuation of The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin,* and most of what has been said about the earlier book is...
The publisher’s note on the jacket of George’s Marvellous Medicine says that ‘Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was voted No 1 (above Winnie the Pooh, Lord of...
Dear Craig, I’ve brought your books down to the sea In order to catch up with what you’ve done Since first I gasped at your facility For writing Martian...
Hans Magnus Enzensberger wrote The Sinking of the Titanic in German. From information supplied in the poem, which in its present form is much preoccupied with the process of its composition, he...