Edward Said and Late Style

Both in art and in our general ideas about the passage of human life there is assumed to be a general abiding timeliness. We assume that the essential health of a human life has a great deal to...

Beethoven was everything at once – impatient, brave, long-suffering, petty, short-tempered, honest, generous to his friends, cruel to his family, ductile and intractable, worldly and deeply innocent. Many of his friends, perhaps especially those who found him impossible, noted this extraordinary innocence.

The year Strauss was born, 1864, saw the publication of Robert Browning’s Dramatis Personae. The author of Andrea del Sarto would have found in Richard Strauss a subject ideally suited to...

He was a poet of a lost world. A hundred years ago, there were still Greek communities along the coast of the Mediterranean, in Asia Minor and in South-East Europe that have since dispersed or...

Suddenly,​ there was nothing to complain about. No cruise ships went up the Giudecca Canal. There were no tourists clogging up the narrow streets. Piazza San Marco was often completely deserted. On some bridges a few gondoliers stood around, but there was no one to hire them. Instead, dogs and their owners walked the streets, with no one pushing them out of the way. People greeted one another familiarly. They had the city back.

Edward Said first met Daniel Barenboim by chance, at the reception desk of the Hyde Park Hotel in June 1993; Said mentioned he had tickets for a concert Barenboim was playing that week. They began to...

Afriend asks me how old Edward Said was when he died. I pause, do the little sum, and say: ‘He was 67, a few months older than I was.’ Then I catch the weird tense. ‘Than I...

The odd thing is that most of the contributors to these books doubt whether it is possible to offer a clear and distinct idea of the subject under discussion. Indeed, Karen Painter, one of the...

In memory of Sandra Lahire

How not to write a biography of Sylvia Plath? We might put the question another way. What is the relationship for a poet between writing a mind and writing a life? Does...

There was once a king who was troubled by all the misery he observed about him. So he summoned his wise men and commanded them to inquire into its causes. The wise men duly looked into the...

In The Leopard, the prince embraces Angelica at the moment of her engagement to his nephew Tancredi, ‘and he felt as if by those kisses he were taking possession of Sicily once more, of the...

Among the minor characters to appear in this biography, the least important (he only gets two sentences) is a manservant whom Britten employed early in 1950, just before starting work on his...

A thief is someone who steals, but what do you call someone who steals and gets caught all the time? Who gets caught lifting handkerchiefs from a Paris department store, for instance, and then a...

Memories of Jewish suffering at the hands of Nazis are the foundation on which most descriptions of extreme ideology and atrocity, and most demands for recognition and reparations, have been built. Universalist reference points are in danger of disappearing as the Israeli military massacres and starves Palestinians, while denouncing as antisemitic or champions of Hamas all those who plead with it to desist.

This​ is an essay about hands and handwriting. I think of handwriting as a way to organise thought into shapes. I like shapes. I like organising them. But because of recent neurological changes in my brain I find shapes fall apart on me.