‘The father places his penis in the mother’s vagina.’ Modern prudery shies away, affronted, from this statement in a manual of sex education – not for Dr Bowdler’s...
Bare winter trees in silhouette against a clear cold turquoise sky just after sunset: during the war, at my aunt’s house in Virginia, I tried to draw them – trees like these in...
When George Eliot died in December 1880 no one doubted that England had lost its greatest novelist. It was a reasonable expectation that she would find her place in Poets’ Corner, near the...
Ian Watt began work on this book in 1955, and the intervening years have seen a boom in Conrad studies: but the thought that there might be nothing left for him to say quite rightly didn’t...
I sometimes lie in the darkness Glad there is nothing I can see To blot the pictures in my memory: Sunlight in a fallen tree Where I hung on the wilting branches; Woodlarks circling in the sky Or...
When the Redcoats first encountered the Colonial revolutionaries they were quite unexpectedly beaten, and according to an anecdote in Harold Rosenberg’s The Tradition of the New, they were...
Professor Roy Harris’s The Language Makers is the natural starting-point. His book comes oddly naked into the world: we have no statement about the aims or intended audience, no listing or...
Every publication is required, by law I believe, to carry the printer’s name. No such rigorous obligation attaches to statements of authorship. It is a licence that fiction, in particular,...
‘Clever Gretchen’ and Other Forgotten Tales sets out to right a balance heavily weighted during the age of the great Victorian collectors of fairy-tales, ballads and lore. In that...
Some sense of history, however vague or inaccurate, has always been an important factor in helping young people define their hopes and fantasies about their eventual place in the world. The story...
They left me alone with the pens And I have gone over my loved one’s face In ink, for something to do. I wanted to see how she looked Telling me not to. I let my hand Trail on her cheek...
George Gissing was convinced that the year 1900 would make all the difference. Writing his study of Charles Dickens in the late 1890s, he refers to his own generation as those ‘upon whom...
The great virtue of the orphan story, I believe, and the reason why it has survived for so many centuries and will continue to do so, is that, when it comes to essentials, we are solitary beings; we are...
This is a dictionary of a language that does not yet quite exist. If this seems a paradoxical way to talk of standard modern Chinese, the paradox is easily enough resolved by a brief account of...
This is John Updike’s first collection of stories for seven years. There must have been problems, he says, to account for such a long delay. His preface glances ruefully at some of them...
Professor Stanford, who this year retires from the Regius Chair of Greek at Trinity College, Dublin after 40 years in office, feels that ‘creative literature is being used more and more as...
You think I am your servant but you are wrong. The service lies with you. During your long Labours at me, I am the indulgent wood, Tolerant of your painstaking ineptitude. Your poems were torn...
The poet E.E. Cummings was born with what are called all the advantages, or with enough of them. It was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in ‘a huge, three-storied, many-roomed structure with 13...