The paradox at the centre of High Fidelity is that while pop songs almost always involve love, passion and raw feeling, the kind of men who are most intensely addicted to pop music tend to be a bunch ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

Reconstruction of the past can rarely be complete. While the physical surroundings and style of a period can be invoked, we can never reconstruct how exactly people feel or think at a given moment. I ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Few people can have had more fun than Peter Lennon, working for an English newspaper in Paris. Lennon arrived in Paris from Dublin in approximately 1960, aged about twenty, and stayed for roughly ten ...

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 ...

Like most good writers Jeremy Lewis enjoyed the art of embellishment. He once described finding the snapped-off head of a toothbrush inside a pork pie in a pub outside Dublin. Do you think that ...