Margaret Boerner

The Meaning of Everything

THE MATISSE/PICASSO exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art reminds us that modern art is already more than one hundred years old. It began as an anti-establishment movement in France in the middle of the nineteenth century, with such post-impressionist painters as Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and…

The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber Harcourt, 838 pp., $26 DURING THE SECOND HALF of the twentieth century, readers complained that the "postmodern" novel--that dark, deconstructing offspring of the novel as perfected by Henry James and James Joyce--was becoming so stylized, formal, and…

The Irish Story Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland by R.F. Foster Oxford University Press, 304 pp., $28 THE AMERICAN UNDERSTANDING of Irish history has often been simplistic. Ireland has rarely been a consideration in American foreign policy--which means that Americans have been able to…

Atonement by Ian McEwan Doubleday, 351 pp., $26 IN 1971, at age twenty-two, Ian McEwan was Malcolm Bradbury's first student in a new master's degree program at the University of East Anglia in England--in what was then the very American subject of "creative writing." Indeed, East Anglia's program…

Mary Shelley by Miranda Seymour Grove Press, 655 pp., $35 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT GODWIN SHELLEY clinched her name in history at the very beginning of her womanhood. She was born in 1797 and at the age of sixteen, she eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley. At the age of nineteen she wrote "Frankenstein."…

DAVID LODGE’S LATEST NOVEL, Thinks..., explores the long-deplored and still-continuing divide between the "two cultures" of Britain, science and the humanities. Scientific investigation is represented by Ralph Messenger, womanizing professor and director of the prestigious "Holt Belling Center for…

To the Hermitage

The Hill Bachelors

How could anything so preposterous have ever been thought beautiful? You can see the low end in the cheap commercial imitations that still stock the flea markets and junk stores of America. Ceramic snakes entwining puce-colored vases. Oak chairs with undulating arms and legs. Electric lamps formed…

When We Were Orphans

A History of Shakespeare on Screen

An epic poem writ small.

What you remember about a film by Federico Fellini are the images. A clown walks a high wire above a village square and sits down in the middle to eat a plate of spaghetti (La Strada, 1954). A prostitute is hypnotized and responds to the suggestion that "Oscar" loves her with a "pure and simple…

George Gordon, Lord Byron, is such a heroic figure and exciting storyteller, one can forget what a very good poet he is. The notorious judgment of his lover Lady Caroline Lamb was that he was "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." Her judgment has resounded ever since, even prompting the movie clunker…

Henry Fielding, the author of Tom Jones, once famously defined the novel as a "comic epic in prose." This turns out to be a surprisingly negative definition, when you think about it. A novel is prose, you see, because it's not poetry. It's an epic, since it's not a lyric; novels tell stories rather…

When, in 1971, Alexander Solzhenitsyn published August 1914, the first volume in his projected magnum opus, The Red Wheel, the general response was that he had written something brilliant. But the emphasis was on the something, rather than the brilliant, for, whatever the book was, it wasn't a…

Word after word, line after line, paragraph after paragraph, John Updike writes a seductively perfect prose. He seems as well never to have suffered writer's block. We have over fifty books from the man, delivered over forty years: a cornucopia of stories, novels, novellas, poems, essays, and book…

However ambivalent they may be about American culture in general, the British often pay more attention -- and homage -- to American art than Americans do. BBC Radio 3 has just finished airing a year of American music, while the London home of the Royal Shakespeare Company hosted a festival in which…

Andrew Motion

George Steiner

Helen Vendler