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...
What can put you off Grace Paley’s stories is their charm. ‘An Interest in Life’ in the collection called The Little Disturbances of Man begins: ‘My husband gave me a...
See, how this lady rises on her swing Encouraged by the brush of Fragonard, As light as love, as ruthless as the Czar, Who, from her height, looks down on everything. When on a canvas an oil-eye...
The Missing Years attempts to show what it was like to be a Jew in Germany during the first 45 years of this century. Dr Richard Lasson, the narrator, traces his own career from front-line...
The life of books is a mysterious thing. If an author is still read fifty years after his death there is a strong likelihood that he will be read five centuries from then. Chaucer, at any rate,...
The recent Pompeii exhibition has been a success in America; and this is why we are offered a handsome new edition of Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, based upon one produced at the Officina Bodoni in...
You could say that Crime and Punishment was a novel about the difference between theory and practice. Well, if you were a philistine, you could. The Possessed, too, deals with ideas and their...
In 1960, Auden completed his third decade as a poet with the volume Homage to Clio. By then, Charles Osborne writes, he was ‘widely regarded as among the few really great poets of the...
When Alcibiades, in that dialogue of Plato’s entitled The Symposium, praises his master Socrates, beyond all doubt the prince of philosophers, he compares him, amongst other things, to a...
The London Yankees has been warmly and widely noticed in this country, and (up to now, anyway) literary editors have set their heavies to the task of reviewing it. Why the fuss over what is,...
No doubt it is yet another symptom of the decline of the West that we can so rarely afford proper novels nowadays, only skimpy little pieces of 130 pages or so, barely enough to last from dinner...
Previous books by Wayne C. Booth, especially The Rhetoric of Fiction, have been well received in the academic world. Since it first made its appearance in the early Sixties, The Rhetoric of...