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 ...

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.

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 ...

When Michel Foucault the French post-structural philosopher, died in Paris on 25th June of an alleged septicaemia – a deadly form of body poisoning caused by lethal organisms and eventual infection of ...

In the second volume of his memoirs, Messengers of Day (1978), Anthony Powell records a 1930s dinner party conversation with Dame Rose Macaulay. No, this lady remarked of some recently published 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 ...

The existence of Fashion depends on people buying more clothes than they wear out. If a garment is replaced only when it is worn out there is no Fashion, if it is worn beyond its natural replacement ...

AT ONE OF the earliest points of our recorded history, the remarkable culture of Mesopotamia flourished, and one of its many versatile and precocious achievements was Gilgamesh, our first recognisable ...

Edmund White has written exquisite, evasive fiction (Forgetting Elena, Caracole) meticulously detailing the relations inside imagined societies; he has also co-written The Joy of Gay Sex. In him a ...

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 ...

Something terrible seems to happen to David Cornwell (alias John Le Carré) every time he leaves England or, to be generous, every time he leaves northern or eastern Europe. Give him a drizzle-sodden ...

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 ...