COLUMN: THE SYCORAX SYNDROME
In an unpublished essay composed some 10 years ago, titled ‘The Sycorax Syndrome’, English poet Christopher Middleton
Zulfikar Ghose
COLUMN: VERGA AND ITALIAN MODERNISM
The eminence claimed for Lampedusa is based on referring to his novel as that by a Sicilian writing about Sicily.
COLUMN: TWO POEMS
Two unpublished poems from the writer…
COLUMN: BOMBAL AND HER VISION
Long before the much-celebrated Latin American boom that is associated with the 1967 publication of One Hundred ...
COLUMN: THE MAKING OF DJUNA BARNES
Reading T.S. Eliot’s letters, one learns how an obscure work by an unknown writer is pushed to the attention of a...
COLUMN: THE CASE OF GEORGE BARKER
The letters in the seventh volume of T.S. Eliot’s massive correspondence — written during 1934-35 when he was a...
COLUMN: PASSAGE TO BEAUTY
As we read in history, since ancient times the Indian subcontinent has attracted explorers and invaders to raid its...
COLUMN: UNPOETIC POETS
Much of today’s English-language poetry seems to be written by people who believe themselves to be poets, but have...
COLUMN: A CANARY’S IDEA OF REALITY
Reality being a fiction that we apprehend in a combination of intertwined languages — which include scientific...
COLUMN: IN MEMORIAM TENNYSON
Some years ago I visited the English department of a university in Pakistan and, on entering the chairman’s ...
COLUMN: PEREC AND THE PUZZLED SELF
Many readers may have heard of a French novel called La Disparition by Georges Perec, written without using the...
COLUMN: EXILED AMONG SPIDERS
Summertime and the tourists are abroad, I among them, seeing the world through a veil of ignorance cast over it like...
COLUMN: AMONG EYELESS STATUES
The shock that then jolts the reader is the substitution in the reader’s mind of the rats by people...
COLUMN: THE WRITERS’ WINTER OF DISCONTENT
It is cold midwinter and the line from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ — “If Winter comes,...
COLUMN: ALL BECAUSE ALICE WAS TIRED
When John Ashbery died last summer, I was reminded of the novel he co-wrote with James Schuyler, A Nest of Ninnies,...
COLUMN: A HERO OF OUR TIME
At another time in another place, a writer complained in the preface to his novel.
COLUMN: SO, YOU WANT TO BE PUBLISHED?
Half a century ago, a competition for a first book of poems, to be judged by W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender, for...
COLUMN: THE UNIMPORTANCE OF BEING ERNEST
A literary agent once said to me that a paragraph in People magazine with some trivial gossip about a writer sold...
COLUMN: The Unforgettable Hatterr
There’s many a neglected genius in literary history. Sometimes, chance leads one to discover a work of...
COLUMN: What’s it all about?
REVIEWING a new play on the radio, a drama critic described it at length — a soldier returning from Afghanistan...