I think it would be wiser to admit that the sensuous and intellectual attractions of almost any given page of Finnegans Wake don’t include much inducement to turn to the next page, and that the...
Staying in Castries for the wedding was a young man called Mr Kennaway. When he watches me I can see that he doesn’t think I am pretty. Oh God, let me be pretty when I grow up.Jean Rhys was...
Scott perhaps illustrates more clearly than other writers the gap between the ideas of the general educated reader and those of the professional academic. The non-professional thinks of him as...
We are waking early now – filled with the urgency small animals must feel as they prepare for winter. I had forgotten how cold it would be – like coming back after a summer of...
John Cheever’s two celebrated novels, The Wapshot Chronicle and The Wapshot Scandal, are now reissued in one volume. In this form, we can see that the two are really one and the end was...
There are several reasons why it is possible, or perhaps even desirable, to disapprove of Tom Wolfe’s writing. It is sometimes verbose; occasionally it is too pleased with its own effects;...
That language changes, and that we cannot prevent it from doing so, is a fact known to all, though some of us can no more contemplate it with resignation than we can death and taxes. It is two...
The publication of Jailbird in Britain is oddly well-timed. The hero of this novel, Walter F. Starbuck, joins the Communist Party before the war while still at Harvard. Later he becomes a civil...
This is no dream By Dulac out of the Brothers Grimm, A child’s aloof disquiet, Her impish mouth, The quilt upon embroidered quilt Of satin and shot silk, Her lying there, at several...
Waste-paper is rubbish; ancient waste-paper is scholarship. Most of Greek and Latin literature disappeared without trace in the Dark Ages; what survived in manuscript was printed and so...
Semiotics, semiology, hermeneutics, structuralist criticism – so many labels, but how many things? If there are distinctions here, they seem to be largely hereditary. The term...
This book – which aims at monumentality and certainly achieves size – deserves to be examined with care. There has been no biography of Conrad since 1960, when Jocelyn Baines...
Frank Kermode’s new book contains a great deal of graceful and dignified prose, especially in the last chapter, and many of the examples are of great interest. It seems to argue that no...
David Arkell calls his biography Looking for Laforgue and he has undoubtedly found him. Without attempting what is popularly labelled ‘official’ biography, Arkell’s informal...
George Orwell was one of the great self-mythologisers. He sought out extreme experiences, was a policeman in Burma and a pauper in Paris and London, lived among unemployed workers in the North of...
Historical fiction is difficult to write, and often unrewarding to read, because it declines so readily into fictionalised history. Famous men utter quotations, strike familiar postures and reach...
No moons are left to see the other side of. Curved surfaces betray once secret centres. Those plagues were measles the Egyptians died of. A certain note of disillusion enters. Were Empson...
All the words I need...