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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Writing to Monica Jones in 1954, Philip Larkin describes his mother, Eva: she is ‘nervy, cowardly, obsessional, boring, grumbling, irritating, self-pitying. It’s no use telling her to alter: you might ...

Ian McEwan is a stranger writer than he sometimes looks. Texturally (well, except maybe in the semi-farcical Solar) he’s a fastidious realist; and yet – as displayed most obviously in Sweet Tooth, ...

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 ...

Long ago, when the Victorians were regarded as moralistic old windbags, Edward Lear, who could hardly have been less ‘serious’, was bound to seem a peripheral figure, and found himself duly exiled to ...