Ted Hughes said “Each year Eliot’s presence reasserts itself at a deeper level, to an audience that is surprised to find itself more chastened, more astonished, more humble”. So it’s strange to learn in The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem that Eliot’s presence was very minor indeed before the publication of the poem…
‘This is a true story’, The Romantic all but begins. It is based, supposedly, on the incomplete biography of Cashel Greville Ross (1799-1882), which William Boyd is meant to have obtained a few years ago and which peppers the novel’s sporadic footnotes. The reader is part of a game from the outset, but one that…
“Terry Tice liked killing people”, begins John Banville’s nineteenth novel: “it was a matter of making things tidy…he had nothing personal against any of his targets…except insofar as they were clutter.” In a certain sense, Banville knows whereof he writes: April in Spain is a clutter-free giallo, utterly filleted of red herrings. It’s not a…
I’ve seen the film. I probably wouldn’t have picked up the book but for learning that J. L. Carr died the very day I was born. The title doesn’t do it any favours, I think: ‘A Month in the Country’ calls up Georgian images of greenwood trees and dusty parsons, the complacent England that Laurie…
As with real sparks, Muriel Spark’s novels only sometimes catch alight for me. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) caught, Loitering with Intent (1981) too, but The Girls of Slender Means (1963) and The Driver’s Seat (1970) didn’t take at all, Spark’s famously firm narrative grip seeming firm to the point of inertia in…
This is not so much a review as some notes on the Notes: “Footnotes on ‘Camp’”, I should really call it. Note the punctuation in the title: “Camp sees everything in quotation marks”, notes Sontag. “To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role”. The inverted commas capture Camp’s fugitive nature, for “to…
T. S. Eliot wrote an essay called ‘To Criticise the Critic.’ Michael Henderson surely considered calling his book To Criticise the Cricket, but then he would have been limited to talking about cricket. That Will Be England Gone – a title cribbed from another poet, Philip Larkin – is a book with little concept of…
Diana Athill made her name in the publishing houses, and in 2016, at the age of 98, she decided that it was time the publisher became the published. The book in question was a slim diary that she had kept almost seventy years before, an account of her trip to Florence in 1947. She was…
A winner of several major prizes in its native France, Violaine Huisman’s now-anglicised debut has received predictably little coverage here. I picked it up on the strength of that half-eaten apple on its spine – Virago – but what about all those readers who aren’t so brand loyal or who need that thousand-word panegyric from…
Writers are rarely the best judges of their own books. Take Ian McEwan, who has expressed grave reservations about his obviously brilliant Cold War thriller, The Innocent (1990), while singling out his deeply flawed second crack at the Cold War, Black Dogs (1992), as his finest work. It’s the other way round, Ian! The fact…
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Bookstalling