W hen a tiny press called Dorothy published Nell Zink’s first novel, The Wallcreeper, in October, nobody knew much about her. She was American but had lived in Germany for years, though...
‘W hat do you suppose is the use of a child without any meaning?’ the Red Queen asks in Through the Looking-Glass. The child to whom this question was addressed was in little...
I first heard of Benjamin Disraeli in a school assembly when I was ten or eleven. Our headmaster also taught history, and though he was known to us mainly as an expert in horse-drawn...
T he oldest joke I know, the oldest joke that a real person quite probably told on a quite probably actual occasion, is one ascribed to Sophocles. Ion of Chios, a lesser poet, claimed he...
O ur 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...
A uden 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...
H e ‘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...
Y ounger 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...
T he 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...
Berryman the poet was closing in on that voice, measure, form and idiom in 1947, even as Berryman the man was becoming seriously unmoored.
I n 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...
I celandic 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?
A s 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...
G erman 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...
A fter 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...