V.S. Pritchett’s short stories are retrospective, provincial, formless and feminine. His is an art that does not care how peripheral it sometimes seems. There are no twists, payoffs,...
Trees Above all, I should find it hard To abandon these trees, This parkful of branches and leaves That for years I have watched grow Thicker, greener, closer – So close now to these tall...
Proust remarked that, like microbes and corpuscles, theories and schools devour one another and by their warfare ensure the continunity of life. I doubt, though, that the present is a time for...
The tree creeps on its knees. The dead branch aims, in the last light. The cat-bird is telescopic. The sun’s escape Shudders shot By wings of ashes. The moon falls, with all its moths, Into...
It calls for no great acumen to spot a connection between adultery and theft. According to Dr Johnson, ‘the essence of the crime’ lay in ‘the confusion of progeny’, for by...
All that long time there was the place I was, All that long same, the dark and constant same. I came to being and it bit my eyes. I want to be a rider like my father. A soldier was my father was...
The first issue of the London Review of Books appeared on 27 September last year, and the present issue is the 14th we have produced. The journal was started when some newspapers were in...
In the night house no one has the knack of keeping things quiet; uncoloured walls fumble, furniture is posed in the nothing-snow, familiar and unreachable, the depletion of lamps, the rage of...
The Parisian Surrealists appear to have taken their games-playing very seriously. Ritual imitations of the creative act – involving the practice of automatic writing, a deep faith in the...
‘Yvonne dear,’ his Aunt said, ‘won’t you do the introduction?’ ‘This is Nancy,’ Yvonne said. ‘This is Andy. This is Mildred. This is George....
‘A heart for every fate’: the title Marchand has chosen, from the enchanting lyric Byron wrote to Thomas Moore in 1817, doesn’t seem quite appropriate. It would have been better...
Arriving early at the cemetery For ‘the one o’clock’, we looked around At the last sparks of other people’s grief, The flowers fading back into the ground. A card...
What can have possessed Graham Greene? The answer, I suspect, is the ghost of Thomas Mann. The Swiss setting of Doctor Fischer of Geneva might be determined by some generic effluvium of Mann, a...
Flora Thompson was born in 1876 in the hamlet of Juniper Hill in Oxfordshire, the daughter of a nursemaid and a stonemason. At the village school she was good at skipping and scripture. She was...
Why on earth ever did (I wonder) Shaw and Wells so much like Grayshott, and Conan Doyle, at Hindhead, build ‘Undershaw’ – when they might have got away, shot of all those dark...
What became of the Modernist movement? It was initiated by Pound and Eliot about the time of the First World War, and in America it set off a further wave of innovation (often referred to as...
At the beginning of this volume Anthony Powell marries into the Pakenham family, which has some resemblance, he discloses, to the Tollands in his sequence of novels A Dance to the Music of Time....
The offscape, the in-folds, secreted Water-holes in the boles of trees, Abandoned bits, this door of water On the wood’s floor (knock with the breath And...