As one who has always envied but never enjoyed the Germanic Sitzfleisch — the scholar’s ability to lodge the body firmly and indefinitely at its task — I think that I can see its fruits in this book. Mind you, it cannot ...

Given life's pluriform character, any autobiography is inevitably selective: but this 'autobiography of belief' is more open to the variety of experience than many other writings of the self. The domestic plays a great ...

Poetry is a likening, even when no metaphor is being deployed, no simile adduced. It knows that it is a miming, and, as often as not, is trying to find out what is being mimed. Murray and Hall are alike in their having ...

W.H. Auden, following Samuel Butler, thought that 'the true test of imagination is the ability to name a cat', and plenty of people, poets and others have believed this: to recast a dictum of Christ's, if you can't be ...

I have no idea whether Kinsella knows the poetry of the American Ben Belitt, who died as an old man in August this year. Belitt’s work is an acquired, and a minority, taste, but it happens to be much to my liking. Commentary ...