No masterpieces but there are beautiful touches: Félix Vallotton at the RA reviewed
Félix Vallotton (1865–1925) was a member of the Nabis (the Prophets), a problematically loose agglomeration of painters, inspired by Gauguin…
The night I kissed Harold Pinter
I think everyone was a little nervous of Harold. Including Harold, sometimes. He was affable, warm, generous, impulsive — and…
‘Ted is liar. Ted beats me up. Ted wishes me dead’: Sylvia Plath descends into madness and misery
In 1923, a Frenchman, Emile Coué, persuaded millions of Americans to finger a piece of string with exactly 20 knots.…
Alexander Calder was a volcano of invention
In the Moderna Museet in Stockholm there is a sculpture by Katharina Fritsch, which references Chekhov’s famous story ‘Lady with…
Worth a trip for the David Joneses alone: Journeys with ‘The Waste Land’ reviewed
To bleak, boarded-up Margate — and a salt-and-vinegar wind that leaves my face looking like Andy Warhol’s botched 1958 nose-peel…
Sappho in America
We are gripped by gossip. Curiosity is a tenacious emotion. In her essay on Push Comes to Shove, the autobiography…
Rich and fruity
F.R. Leavis once denounced the Twickenham edition of Pope’s Dunciad for producing a meagre trickle of text through a desert…
Poet as predator
Craig Raine says that Jonathan Bate’s unauthorised biography of Ted Hughes gets it wrong on every level
The raw material of fiction
Saul Bellow’s lurid personal life — especially the triangular relationship with his wife and her lover — was the basis for his best work, says Craig Raine
Powerful pathos
The impersonator — Rory Bremner, Steve Coogan — speaks, in different voices, to a single primitive pleasure centre in his…
