When the American poet Fitz-Greene Halleck (1790-1867) travelled to Europe in 1822 he was carrying letters of introduction to Byron, Scott, Southey, Wordsworth, Lafayette and Talleyrand, though...
Had Amy Levy (1861-89) never existed, contemporary criticism would have thought her up. We have been recovering women writers for three decades now, but Levy was also a Jew and probably a...
The popularity of what is known as ‘literary biography’ suggests that there is a large audience eager to read about literature, but one that is not to be persuaded that the works of...
I have a friend who has a friend who is a composer of international stature, heavily invested in the aesthetics of difficulty. He’s also opera-addicted and likes to get to the Met whenever...
In Prague people still say: ‘I do not want to die like Tycho Brahe.’ This means: ‘I have to go to the lavatory.’ In this way the memory of the greatest astronomer of early...
This is the first comprehensive biography of Saul Bellow and the first to receive his co-operation over the complete, ten-year span of its writing. The author, James Atlas, whose biography of...
There is a whiff of apology about the beginning of this book. Daphne du Maurier is known to be a trashy writer of escapist romance: you’re likely to find Jamaica Inn, Frenchman’s...
Insofar as my mother ever voices any ambitions for my brother and me, it is that we should become gentlemen farmers earning £10 a week. This would have been in the early 1940s when £500 a year is a not...
Somewhere in London, two heads would be nodding together: one tall like the boulder topping a cairn, the other broadened like a Hallowe’en pumpkin. Two lordly sensibilities, the...
Every once in a while, something happens to you that makes you realise that the human race is not quite as bad as it so often seems to be. In 1972, I was on the London Underground when a man...
By the end of the 20th century, Joan was known throughout the world for inspiring the campaign that ultimately brought the expulsion of the English from France; for having been burned by the English; for...
Everything that is planned for the Opera House is based on the desire to take people from their daily routine into a world of fantasy, a world which they can share with the musicians and actors....
Prison does nothing for the complexion, but spells in Newgate and Holloway, combined with a rackety way of life, had left unravaged the face of Mrs Georgina Weldon, whose radiant likeness...
Admiration is defined by Johnson in that Dictionary as ‘taken sometimes in a bad sense, though generally in a good’, and he was, for the greater part of his life, a great engine of self-admiration,...
In Donna Tartt’s novel The Secret History, a group of clever, fastidious preppies in a small liberal arts college on the East Coast reinvent the cult of Dionysus. They brew a concoction of...
What is interesting about Bosie is that he was such a thoroughly bad character. It only adds to the fascination that this bundle of malice, treachery, deceit, hypocrisy and vanity was wrapped up...
With the decline of religious faith, we drift, so it’s said, on the current, clinging to the raft of materialism. The last flickers of collective spiritual belief were doused by the...
In February 1932, on the occasion of George Moore’s 80th birthday, a group of distinguished London literati published an encomium in the Times paying homage to ‘a master of English...