On a Saturday morning in November 1966, Tom Phillips picked a book at random from a pile of novels at a house-clearance sale in Peckham Rye. Phillips had never heard of W.H. Mallock’s A...
When Ford Madox Ford published No More Parades, the second of the four novels that make up Parade’s End, in 1925, he was likened to Proust and Joyce. Three years later the final instalment,...
Amativeness was the cause of Isabella Robinson's disgrace: Soon after they met in Edinburgh, Combe examined Isabella’s skull. He informed her that she had an unusually large cerebellum, an...
Henry James was foul about Far from the Madding Crowd. Thomas Hardy’s knobbly rusticities and merry peasants would not do.
Seventeenth-century critics thought Ben Jonson England’s finest writer. Even until the mid-18th century he was conventionally regarded as at least Shakespeare’s equal. It was he more...
‘I have forgotten my umbrella,’ Nietzsche wrote in the margins of an unpublished manuscript. Whether he wanted to remind himself of the phrase, which he put in inverted commas, or of...
from ‘Agamemnon’ The city was still smouldering end to end. We buried the dead, then, at twilight, went down to the beach and set tables for the victory feast. When Helen lifted her...
On the outskirts of Mithila, a fabled city where they would soon rest having completed their sacrificial mission, the Sage took the boys past a neglected ashram. Rama, by the entrance, walked...
The swimming pool we all know, blue and rectangular. And the body, ‘floating near the deep end, where a line of pine trees kept the water cool in their shade’. The family around it,...
The Souls of the Dead My grandmother, her oddly accurate euphemism, turning up to the doctor. She meant caught in stirrups on the examining table, a doctor warming and wincing his speculum to eye...
Sex began in academia a decade later than it did for Philip Larkin. From the rise of the women’s movement to the postmodern cult of the perverse, few themes have been more persistent in...
They follow you around the store, these power ballads, you and the women with their shopping carts filled with eggs, cookies, 90 fl.oz. containers of anti-bacterial dishwashing liquid, buffeting...
A penis in pickle, and a dreadful wife made to vanish into another dimension by means of an esoteric yoga pose. A narrator who rapes and murders his wife, gratified that the two climaxes coincide...
after Nonnus Horned child, double-born into risk, guarded by satyrs, centaurs, raised by the nymphs of Nysa, by the Hyades: here he was, the toddler, Dionysus. He cried ‘Daddy!’...
Goethe’s most famous novel was once a Europe-wide sensation. There were Werther-themed prints, figurines, jewellery, perfume, fans, crockery and men’s clothing. The novel itself first...
Working out how to handle a figure as mercurial as Casement should have come naturally to Vargas Llosa.
One of the great attractions of James Fenton’s verse is the way it manages so often to be both plain and cryptic at once. It urges us to think about what we can’t quite know, and it...
A Frost Fair That old cliché: it seemed that time had stopped; and people we thought we knew came quietly out of the cold to meet us. Some of us thought it had something to do with the sun,...