Philip Hensher is professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and the author of 11 novels including A Small Revolution in Germany.
Michelle de Kretser, of a Sri Lankan family living in Australia, is an exceptional novelist – perhaps among the ten best at work in English today. She has been recognised with literary prizes, but it’s surprising that she hasn’t made quite the impact on the public she deserves. She is one of those writers who
The preservation of a strict social hierarchy rests very often on the enforcement of correct modes of address. In America today any university student may address any other as ‘dude’, but those who have attained a certain level of prestige will object if an unwary low-status blunderer ventures to call them ‘bro’. Rebels seeking to
A commercial publisher bringing out a book of old academic essays on Austrian writers, some completely unknown to English readers, might need an explanation. In this case the author is W.G. Sebald, who produced a series of cogitative books that made his name in the 1990s. Before he acquired the worldwide authority of The Emigrants,
It might help if we stopped calling them ‘the Brothers Grimm’, which always makes them sound like characters in one of their fairy tales. We don’t talk about ‘the Sisters Brontë’, after all. In reality, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm have been described, very accurately, as ‘visionary drudges’. The Children’s and Household Tales, the first edition
Just as you always hope will happen, I knew I had met the man of my dreams almost on sight. I had made a booking the day before. I arrived. Burak was just finishing the previous customer and gestured with a comb towards an armchair. A Turkish coffee was brought. The customer paid and left
Writing the history of the novel, even covering a limited period, is a challenge. No one could possibly read every novel that has been published. Even if you read 100 a year you would scarcely scratch the surface. It isn’t like writing a history of most other subjects, where the important matters select themselves. You
It was a few months ago. I was coming back from my morning walk with Greta in Battersea Park, so it can only have been half past ten in the morning. A familiar neighbourhood figure zigzagged recklessly across the road towards us. He had something like a sense of purpose about him. Telling a stranger
Not every human culture leaves clear and legible accounts of itself. Here we have a comparatively recent way of life which we know thousands of men led. It was proscribed, and those who lived within it had good reasons to conceal their participation and nature, usually taking care not to leave any records. Invisible and,
For the moment, can there be anything new to say about Elizabeth II? In time, the archives will open up and more of her correspondence and any of the diary we know she kept will be made available to the public. (I wouldn’t get too excited – no monarch’s diary since Victoria’s has had much
Over at the judging for Waggiest Tail, things were getting acrimonious. ‘That bloody woman,’ my new acquaintance muttered. We were sitting behind the rope barrier in the front row and had formed a bond over a serious injustice in Prettiest Bitch. ‘I’m pretty sure she threw this category three, four years back. I happen to
In 1876, writing to his friend Gertrude Tennant, Gustave Flaubert set down a principle that artists and writers should live by: Soyez réglé dans votre vie et ordinaire comme un bourgeois, afin d’être violent et original dans vos œuvres. (Be regular in your life and ordinary as a bourgeois, in order to be violent and
The question ‘Was Shakespeare gay?’ is not very rational. It might be a little like asking ‘Was Shakespeare a Tory?’. Some of his scenarios might coincide with later developments – Jaques trying to pick up Ganymede in As You Like It (gay), or Ulysses’s speech on degree in Troilus and Cressida (Tory). But the historical
About halfway round the park, by the last spindly remnants of the Festival of Britain, I bumped into my Scandinavian acquaintance. ‘Beautiful day,’ I said. ‘I thought you’d be in Sweden by now.’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not quite. My daughter’s going for midsummer – it’s her first time on her own. We’re going a little
The problem is, we really need a Tory party. Whether we have one at the moment is another question. Political debate requires a significant and trustworthy proponent of personal freedom, of the limits of government, of personal responsibility, of strict limitations of government expenditure, of independent enterprise which may succeed through a lack of intrusive
One of us must once have told a political pollster: ‘I really have no idea at all who I’m going to vote for.’ A moment of mild exasperation put us down as ‘Don’t knows’. Forever afterwards, the prospect of an election, whether for Wandsworth council, the Mayor of London or the Battersea parliamentary constituency, brings
The first time I went to India, nearly 30 years ago, I was sent as a young novelist by the British Council. Unusually, my first encounter with the country was Kolkata, a city I loved instantly. At the first event, after I had finished reading, an audience member gently asked if I liked Indian novels.
If you want to understand in detail what people in the past were capable of doing, thinking and saying, there is nothing like studying court proceedings. When restrictions were placed on other reportage of human behaviour, the courts had to find out about all sorts of activity. At a time when novelists could hardly write
All sorts of animals have been kept as pets over the centuries. We know of sparrows in Catullus and John Skelton. There is a badger with a collar in a fresco by Signorelli – probably not much more biddable than the lobster Gerard de Nerval supposedly took for walks in Paris. The word ‘puss’ seems
I blame Kafka. When he died in 1924, the vast majority of his imaginative work remained unpublished, including three novels and a substantial number of remarkable short stories. He left instructions, however, for Max Brod, his literary executor, that all his unpublished work should be destroyed. Brod ignored this, and brought some classics of German
The early stages of a literary work are often of immense interest. It is perhaps a rather tawdry kind of interest, like paparazzi shots of a Hollywood starlet taking the bins out before she’s put her make-up on. Of course it’s extraordinary to think that some of the most famous characters, events and lines in
