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...
The easy truism, that a good children’s book is a book that’s good for children too, has enough truth in it to ensure that most fiction reviewers are at least open to the genre. But unless...
We can know Byron better than anyone has ever known him. Leslie Marchand’s edition of the Letters and Journals, which is far more extensive than any previous collection, has now covered...
As I walk down to the shore at daybreak You cross my path, old softstepper, Just by the Tor where we’ve often smelt you. Making tracks for your earth and cubs, Back from the saltmarsh and...
In his moving first novel The Sweet Shop Owner Graham Swift illuminated the history of one man through flashbacks on the last day of that man’s life. Through the succinctly evoked...
That last summer a small stand of bracken leaped from the hillside into our pasture, clearing a four-foot cattle-proof sheep-proof fence. Father cast on the intruder a cold country eye....
It is impossible not to like Matthew Arnold now that we know him so well. There is no stereotyped Victorian sage in this excellent biography, which is a joy to read, nor are there stereotyped...
They flop their big, blunt heads over the wire like dim children penned in hospital cots. Eyes roll, and a silvery iris-petal unfurls to lick the salt from my bare arm. Then each takes it in turn...
At the beginning of Italo Calvino’s first book for six years, an entirely fictional personage named You, the Reader, buys and settles down with a novel which he firmly believes to be the...