Our laws are unfortunately not widely known, they are the closely guarded secret of the small group of nobles who govern us. We like to believe that these old laws are scrupulously adhered to,...
Auden loved aphorisms, extracts, notes, lists. It was not just the shortness of short forms that he approved of: he liked their refusal of system even more, their acknowledgment that...
This line came to me out of the dark: suspiciously luminous gherkin. And then it was the promised iceberg, an intern with his neurohammer, midnight calm, a lake of tea, the south with its...
He ‘understands what you’re going to say better than you understand it yourself’, Gilbert Ryle said of the young Bernard Williams, ‘and sees all the possible objections...
Younger readers – how I’ve dreamed of beginning a review with those snitty Amis/Waugh-type words – will need reminding that in the 1970s and 1980s there was no getting round...
The meanings that the word abroad has accumulated since it was first used to mean ‘widely scattered’ include: ‘out of one’s house’ (Middle English), ‘out of...
Berryman the poet was closing in on that voice, measure, form and idiom in 1947, even as Berryman the man was becoming seriously unmoored.
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...