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Jim was a passionate fan of Isaiah Berlin and of Michel Foucault, both of whom he had met personally on visits which they had made at various times to New York. He asked me to obtain a copy of Alexander Herzen’s My Past and Thoughts for him, because Isaiah Berlin claims somewhere that it is one of …

Everything about Jim was in huge proportions: over six foot three, he was lean and lanky, with a luxuriant mantle of shining jet hair cast carelessly over his elongated back, and a leopard walk, his limbs curving forward like a giant, caged cat. Jim had the most majestic hands; to say they were the…

I first met Jim in New York in August 1970. I had been in New York for three days. He invited me to go to a concert with him in Central Park to hear Alicia de Larrocha play Liszt and Ravel. It was a dramatic pause in my first few days of furious tourism.

The skyscrapers of the city rise in mammo…

This is the counsel of despair which would keep the mind out of hell. The tradition is far kinder in its understanding that to live, to love, is to be failed, to forgive, to have failed, to be forgiven, for ever and ever. Keep your mind in hell, and despair not.

A crisis of illness, bereavement,…

Love-making is never simply pleasure. Sex manuals or feminist tracts which imply the infinite plasticity of position and pleasure, which counsel assertiveness, whether in bed or out, are dangerously destructive of imagination, of erotic and of spiritual ingenuity. The sexual exchange will be as com…