Count Leo Tolstoi’s final novel was published in installments throughout 1898, in a magazine. In fact, in several magazines. Tolstoi was seventy years old in an exhausting year. Tolstoi had to check cuts made in his work by censors, week after week. Censors were not the writer’s only problem; closer to home, Sonya, Tolstoi’e wife, […]

Bruce was a close friend of Kingsley Amis. Both had been at St John’s, together with Philip Larkin.Bruce was regarded as wealthy. He was already composing musical scores for British movies. Kingsley would say jokingly that while he and Larkin had to drink beer in The Bird and Baby (aka The Eagle and Child, a […]

Kingsley, born in 1922, came up to St. John’s College, where he met Philip Larkin. They remained friends for life. Kingsley was good at friendship. I am convinced that it was Kingsley who got me a place in ‘Who’s Who’, but he was not the sort of bloke who would sneak round later, saying, ‘Look, […]

Another friend, a writer, this one strange and, like Kafka, an exile from the ordinary world in which most of us are destined to live: Anna Kavan. Anna welcomed me to her home, the home of her own design. We met towards the end of her life. I knew nothing of her heroin habit, a […]

SOLZHENITSYN died in August 2008, at the age of 89. He is never forgotten, or so we hope and expect. With his courage, his humour, and his determination go his experience of suffering and survival in Stalin’s labour camps. Those terrible camps form the centrepiece of Solzhenitsyn’s greatest book, THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO. When the great […]

Shakespeare is different. Different from all others, I mean. More – well, among other things, more personal. Entirely of my own volition, I came to live in Oxford. I had left the barbaric foreign islands occupied by the British Army and sought culture here. I found much Shakespeare in Oxford, and now we, or some […]

Mary Shelley’s grim fantasy, “Frankenstein Or The Modern Promethius” – to quote its full title – was published on New Year’s Day 1818. It has rarely been out of print in one form or another since.This first edition carried a preface by the poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley. In its early days, there were those who […]

Everyone liked Bob Shaw. He was an Irishman with an amazing sense of what was funny about the universe. His early SF novel, ‘Orbitsville’ (1975) was a success, though by success we mean within the SF field and sadly never noticed beyond those limits. That, probably, was what happened to his suceeding books, all with […]

In one of his essays, Joseph Brodsky, talking about Osip Mandelstam, says this about our lives: Any poet, no matter how much he writes, expresses in his verse, physically or statistically speaking, at most one tenth of his life’s reality. The rest is normally shrouded in darkness. Is this admirable remark what we feel about […]

Mention has been made of the Inklings. This was the literary group which met frequently in the aforementioned pub, The Bird and Baby. The leading members were C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. One was accustomed to seeing Tolkien bustling along in the Broad, clutching a copy of Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer. Possibly he was then – […]