Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles County is part of the so-called South Bay, south of Santa Monica. It was mostly populated by middle-class white people when I grew up there in the 1950s, and was a...
On the Smolensk Road The Stukas, finished with the men and tanks, turned back for the civilians – the mile-after-mile of refugees scuffing and trundling behind the Russian retreat and...
Frank Kermode is too multifarious a writer to have anything as dogged as a theme for his critical work; too sane and stealthy to boast of anything as limiting as an obsession. But there are...
Sectarianism seldom plays any part in Scottish writing. One of the few exceptions – and the most pertinent to Liam McIlvanney’s novel – comes in Ian Rankin’s Mortal Causes...
In one of literary history’s great instances of the pot calling the kettle black, Henry James complained of ‘the absence of spontaneity, the excess of reflection’ in George...
If modernism is our antiquity, as T.J. Clark has claimed, then Barbara Guest was a devout classicist. No American poet – with the exception of John Ashbery – so reverently extended...
Ah the Raj! Our mother-incarnateVictoria Imperatrix rules the sceptredsphere as she oversees legions of maiden‘fishing fleets’ breaking the wavesfor the love of a...
Like Matisse, bending over ink and watercolour on a shut-in terrace to sketch the only wineglass on his table. Its coiled, thick stem. The row of blobs below its bowl a choker of pearls for a...
Son of Zeus, son of the thunderbolt, Iacchus the twice-born, child of the double door, Bromius the roaring god, the coming one, the vanishing one, the god who stands apart; god of frenzy and...
‘I think,’ T.S. Eliot wrote in February 1923, ‘it will take me a year or two to throw off The Waste Land and settle down and get at something better which is tormenting me by...
The marmoreal lustre of our received image of T.S. Eliot is dimmed by this unrelenting catalogue of blunders. It is as if the waspish elegance and dogmatic certitude of his published prose were being...
I don’t believe in race. I believe there are people who will shoot me or hang me or cheat me and try to stop me because they do believe in race, because of my brown skin, curly hair, wide...
‘Let yourself look into the abyss,’ commands Manage Your Mind: The Mental Fitness Guide. ‘Put into words the catastrophe that you fear . . . Sometimes it seems not too...
It wasn’t meant to stand for what it stood for. Only a puptent could do that. Besides, we were in a state called New York, where only bees made sense. Those who were with us were not with...
One of the great examples of literary advice-giving took place in the summer of 1878. Guy de Maupassant was on the verge of becoming famous. As Flaubert’s literary nephew, and a member of...
By the time Auden came to live in the Brewhouse, a cottage in the grounds of Christ Church, in 1972 I had long since left Oxford and in any case would never have had the nerve to speak to him....
John Carey has had access to voluminous archives stored in the Faber basement or in the keeping of William Golding’s family. No one else may see them; he alone can quote from unpublished...
My mother taught me to read in the summer of 1945, between VE Day and VJ Day, when I was turning three. Time lay on her hands: my father, a major in the Territorials, was away in Palestine,...