I have moved into other fields since studying literature in the nineteen seventies. I continue, however, to owe much of my approach to this background and I have, at times, written reviews and articles that bear at least some resemblance to literary criticism.
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Enemy alien - on Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday »
February 2nd, 2008 | Posted in: War & peace, Literature, Articles General‘First published in 1943, The World of Yesterday could scarcely be less like the popular confessional autobiographies of our time, which tend to be soft-centred victimologies in which the self is presented as an innocent, child-like entity, while history comes across as a form of abuse…’
An article from Guardian Review, 2 February, 2008.
Facing up to the subterranean stream: the challenge of Robin Blaser’s libretto »
August 1st, 2001 | Posted in: Literature, Music, Articles in Books, Articles GeneralAbout the libretto, by Robin Blaser, of Harrison Birtwistle’s opera, ‘The Last Supper’. Written for Glyndbourne Festival Opera, the first version was published in the seasonal programme book, Glyndbourne 2001, pp. 174-9.
Douglas Oliver’s Penniless Politics »
October 24th, 1991 | Posted in: Literature, Articles GeneralAbout Douglas Oliver and his New York poem Penniless Politics Published as ‘Poet of the lower depths’, the Guardian, 24 October 1991.
Going to Blazes »
February 12th, 1988 | Posted in: Literature, Articles GeneralA review of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. Published in The Guardian, 12 February 1988