In The Waste Land, a ‘young man carbuncular’ makes a play for ‘the typist home at teatime’: Flushed and decided, he assaults at once; Exploring hands encounter no...
Icelandic sagas are a strange anomaly in the literature of medieval Europe. There are ‘legendary sagas’ such as The Saga of the Volsungs; biographies of the Norwegian kings,...
I will have writings written all over it in human words: wrote Blake. A running form, Pound’s Blake: shouting, whirling his arms, his eyes rolling,...
What if we dislike or despise or hate poems because they are – every single one of them – failures?
As seen by the English-speaking world, the Spanish Civil War was a screen on which certain images could be projected, images of harsh sunlight, moral clarity and sacrifice. It was an...
German scholars used to worry about something they called ‘Das Adam Smith Problem’. There seemed to be two of him: one was the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, awash with...
After working on his film adaptation of William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1991), David Cronenberg apotheosised both the writer and himself by claiming his screenwriting and...
Always, I am coming home from hunting frogs or standing in the swim of wind beneath the last dyke and the sea;...
Hegel believed that happiness was largely confined to the private life, a view that would scarcely survive a reading of the modern novel. A lot of fiction since the early 20th century takes it...
I Tom Stoppard sold his house in France: ‘I was sick of spending so much time at Gatwick.’ II At the UK Border, I double and treble through the retractable queuing barrier. Now I have...
lost/lust Stumbling under the kapok tree, fevering between its cathedral buttresses, I am loster than lost in a place where every known sound has its counterpart: tap dripping into a metal...
Robert Lowell has a poem called ‘Picture in The Literary Life, a Scrapbook’ which begins:A mag photo, I before I was I, or my books –a listener … A cheekbone gumballs...
Shadow Man Shadow man’s still there, his back to it all, huddled over the picnic table, even after Halloween, after the first big December rain, the pre-Christmas all day...
‘My only talent is for comedy,’ Coetzee writes to himself. His writer’s diaries – six small notebooks he kept in the 1970s and 1980s, now housed at the Harry Ransom...
Bellow was in charge of whatever facts he chose to be interested in, and his genius, which can’t be doubted, outstripped anyone’s claim to possess their own story.
In 1983, Sergei Dovlatov told an interviewer that the literary situation in the Soviet Union was worse than ever. ‘If under Stalin talented writers were at first published, subsequently...
By the end of the 1980s, two formerly arcane disciplines with roots in the French 1940s were readily available to British aspirants. One was post-structuralism, which not many years earlier...
Remarque apparently knew that The Promised Land would be his last novel, and meant it to be one of his finest, perhaps his masterwork.