In his introduction to Eminent Edwardians Dr Piers Brendan tells us his work 'follows Strachey's pattern and attempts to unlock an age by means of a few key figures' whose "eminence was global".' He ...

Better a good comedy with a bad title, wrote the 18th-century German critic Lessing, than the reverse. And this work indeed has an ingenious and apposite main title. Sadly, the content does not ...

At the First Soviet Writers' Congress held in Moscow in 1934, the Soviet short story writer Isaak Babel proclaimed himself the 'master of silence'. Like Olesha and Erdman, Babel could not bring ...

A whole section of the art of critical self-defence is devoted to the docketting and pigeonholing of 'difficult' writers: it saves one from the ghastly business of actually reading and forming an ...

F0r those teachers of English as a foreign language familiar with the grim text books which aim to present it through drill exercises in phonetics, intonation and stress-patterns, this recent ...

Rosenberry's concern is with technique and theme, not with interpretation as such. This modest aim will come as a welcome relief to those suffering from the excesses of the Melville industry. His ...

We all know the true story of how Father Christmas came to be. It was the work of Siberian shamans high on ...

For most people the ballad possesses an aura of quaintness, of temporal and social remoteness that invites either patronising academic dissection or folksy sentimentality. This aura Alan Bold aims to ...

For both Russia and the West, Dmitri Shostakovich was the great Soviet composer. Born a year after the 1905 revolution, professionally trained after the Bolshevik takeover, he was the recipient of ...

This is a truly excellent book, one of the best it has been my pleasure to read in the line of duty for years. Joanne Harris achieves everything a novelist should aim for, with no sense of effort or ...

Toni Morrison’s new novel is like the music that gave it its title. It is rhythmic, emotional, controlled even in its wildest moments, skilful, subversive and irresistibly seductive. It is born out of ...

In 1992, Joseph Brodsky published Watermark, a book-length essay that brings together his impressions of Venice in winter – he refused to go there in any other season – and a series of powerful and ...