Activity

Reviewers of Sleepless Nights were tempted to see the woman depicted as the mother of the narrator as the author’s mother. It is likely that “her weight on a stepladder washing windows, her roast and potatoes and fat yeast rolls” and the “peculiar, helpless assertiveness” that reflected “her profou…

Thinking of those times of transition—and of their violations, contested in vain and now institutionalised and extended—a lover of Capri must gratefully wonder that beauty continues to prevail there—not as touristic prettiness, but in the grand and ultimate indifference of Nature to the antics of h…

He asked whether I could remember a poem at sight. I told him that I had rarely “memorised” a poem, even at school, and had no “system”; that I remembered particular lines at once, being moved by them, and then might read the poem over, bear it in mind, say it aloud when I was alone. Then I might r…

Noticing, on another raking of our Capri shelves, Leon Edel’s volumes of Henry James’s letters, Graham said that he, too, brought those books to Capri: “They make me want to write.”

To write fiction is to learn to inhabit other skins, whether thinner or thicker than one’s own. (Thus Auden, parap…

Two tall figures under umbrellas appeared in the empty square and loped across to the café: a pair of Englishmen wearing raincoats, and one—the elder—with a black beret. The man with the beret was Graham Greene. I recognised him—as one would; and also because I had seen him in the past on Capri, at…