A Single Volume Bound by Love
Clive James’s new Dante is the highly effective work of a poet who has absorbed tradition, who is aware of the demands of form, whose translations are imaginative and whose scholarship is immaculate.
All the Known World
Many critics focus on James Salter’s stylistic precision and love of detail as if he is all surface. In fact, his art ushers us towards a larger view, an understanding of American character that is rooted in history.
Astonished at Everything
Generosity and largeness of vision seem to meet happily in the poems of Uruguayan-French writer Jules Supervielle, which seem to cover great distances in short spaces.
Staring Down the Barrel
Some critics have found the protagonist of Claire Messud’s new novel unlikeable, which is not just absurd but ironic, given that the novel’s premise is society’s expectations of women’s behaviour.
Birds, beasts and flowers
DH Lawrence’s poetry offers a record of the powerful current of physical pleasure, the elusive joy of witnessing that which is different, and the kind of opinionated prickliness when things are not what they seem to be or should be.
Brave Answers
A new collection casts further light on the clergyman-poet RS Thomas and his two great subjects, God and Wales
The Hunger Angel
Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller looked with the eyes of the victim on the political masters of terror and called it by its name.
One Book, Two Cities
James Plunkett’s classic novel reminds us of a society in which the poorest lived in the most appalling and hopeless conditions and the middle and upper classes were barely conscious of their existence.
Hopkins’s Wound
Gerard Manley Hopkins was careless of the fate of his poems, treated his muse like a slut and her children as an unwanted and vaguely sinful burden.
And Another Thing
The most recent translation of WG Sebald’s work offers the expected pleasure of his engaging prose style and an introduction to the world of some intriguing German writers.