A pressed fly, like a skeleton of gauze, Has waited here between page 98 And 99, in the story called ‘Bliss’, Since the summer of ’62, its date, Its last day in a trap of pages....
This is seemingly the first draft of roughly half of a novel which, had he lived to finish it, the author might possibly have entitled ‘The Doctor of Confusion’. It is right that it...
Donald Davie has proposed that Eliot’s Quartets are in some sense a work of self-parody, with ‘The Dry Salvages’ in structure and style parodistic of the quartets that preceded...
Way back, when the century was in its early prime, we used to have Outlines of Everything. The archetype was the Outline of Modern Knowledge, but there were lots of others. I can see them still,...
Literary theory is somewhat bewilderingly in the news, and it is worth pausing over this well-written book, in which a young American Germanist develops his thoughts about the variety of it known...
His wet waders dipped in lacquer by the light, the lobsterman puts out to sea against the tide that tilts his boat. From where we stand, up on the dunes, his wicker pots have dwindled already to...
Since I am about to comment on other people’s published reactions to Martin Amis’s novel Other People, it seems right to state in summary form my own feelings on the main matters that...
Is stage-history much use finally? Finally, that is, beyond all this fiddle over plans and parterres and side-boxes, the cost of nails and packthread, the greenroom gossip? I concede straight...
Katherine Mansfield was born in 1888, Sylvia Ashton-Warner in 1908 and Janet Frame in 1924 – three New Zealand women each of whom has achieved some measure of literary fame or reputation...
‘It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations,’ wrote Sir Winston Churchill in My Early Life. In America this need was famously recognised by the publishers of...
Bent to the ground in the gesture of prayer, one morning in Kashmir in 1915, Aadam Aziz accidentally bumps his nose – and gives up prayer for ever. This event ‘made a hole in him, a...
Why is the novel frightened of ideas? When did the dominant literary form of Western society turn away from dealing with large issues? Mary McCarthy’s 1980 Northcliffe Lectures begin by...
He’s lying in poor water, a yard or so depth of poor safety. Maybe only two feet under the no-protection of an outleaning small oak, Half under a tangle of brambles. After his two thousand...
The other day my bookseller airily assured me that nobody reads Faulkner nowadays. If he had said ‘nobody under sixty’ I might not so easily have dismissed his opinion as Celtic...
In 1949, a moment when I was editing the novel pages of the Times Literary Supplement, a book came in called A Mine of Serpents, author Jocelyn Brooke. The name was familiar on account of a...
‘In 1979 Robert Penn Warren – novelist, critic, and dean of American poets – returned to his native Todd County, Kentucky, to attend ceremonies in honor of another native son...
Early in 19—, when Srinagar was under the spell of a winter so fierce it could crack men’s bones as if they were glass, a young man upon whose cold-pinked skin there lay, like a...
It’s hard to imagine what once seemed so liberating about The Naked Lunch, a famous cult novel of the Beat generation. A not unsympathetic critic, Leslie Fiedler, found much of it...