In Harold Bloom’s native United States, his latest tome has proved something of a publishing phenomenon. When I visited New York last autumn, this academic panorama of Shakespeare was enjoying a ...

‘Nothing is implied in this publication about any person, living or dead, which is not herein explicitly stated.' Thus runs the caveat inside the front cover of this sustained politico-religious ...

The author of this marvelous book is a Polish journalist and it so happens that I know him. We met in Mexico in 1972 when he was correspondent there for the Polish Press Agency. I found him a ...

Ancient Rome was a culture governed by the spoken word and Cicero was the most articulate public speaker Rome ever produced.

Debussy once asked Mallarme if he could set one of his poems to music. But, replied Mallarme, have I not already set it to music? Hilary Mantel has decided to treat the French Revolution as a novel.

Martin Amis’s new novel is clearly the result of the same forces which he says prompted him to write Einstein’s Monsters: Parenthood and a belated reading of Jonathon Schell’s Fate of the Earth. In ...

Geoffrey Hill is, in the opinion of many, the best poet now writing in England, though he is not the best known. He was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, in 1932, the only child of a police ...

Samuel Beckett began Our Exagmination Round his Factification For Incarnation Of Work In Progress, the first ever collection of essays on Finnegans Wake, with the memorable remark that: ‘The danger ...

Do we experience life as a continuum or as a series of disconnected shocks and accidents? Alice Munro started writing at a time when novelists, at least, were preoccupied with coherence, with ...

In Arabia Jonathan Raban suggested that if the Arabs were to acquire a genuine contemporary literature, it would be written by women ‘because women were the only people living under the kind of strain ...

No star has been rising more rapidly in the critical firmament over the past decade than Mikhail Bakhtin, communist, Russian Orthodox theologian, revolutionary philosopher of language, founding father ...

Robert Nye has been much praised, even adulated, for his novels. I can also recommend his poems: ‘a heron stands/like a sickle dipped in feathers’. This luckily occurs twice in the collection – it’s ...