From the author of The Savage God, a unique memoir of growing old, and a lesson in not going gently into that good nightThe ponds of Hampstead Heath are small oases; fragments of wild nature nestled in the heart of north-west London. For the best part of his life Al Alvarez – poet, critic, novelist, rock-climber and poker player – has swum in them almost daily.An athlete in his youth, Alvarez chronicles what it is to grow old with humour and fierce...

'In a book this good, in the company of a mind this judicious and fine, the reader is left wanting more' TelegraphPoetry, poker, mountaineering, novels - a sparkling collection of essays from Britain's best-loved man of letters________________________Al Alvarez's writing career has come in many guises. One of the most influential post-war critics, he has written profoundly and eloquently about writers and the...

'Should not be neglected by anybody with a serious interest in modern literature and literary criticism.' Frank Kermode'Is there a more charming literary companion than Al Alvarez? To read this book is to feel the shutters of the mind being slowly jemmied apart, an agonising delight' Spectator_____________________'For a writer, voice is a problem that never lets you go, and I have thought about it for...

An intelligent and sympathetic analysis of one of the true taboos of modern life.Using the untimely death of the poet and friend, Sylvia Plath, as a point of departure, Al Alvarez confronts the controversial and often taboo area of human behaviour: suicide.The Savage God explores the cultural attitudes, theories, truths and fallacies surrounding suicide and refracts them through the windows of philosophy, art and literature: following the black thr...

This groundbreaking study of the work and legacy of Virginia Woolf is also an account of the intertwined lives of two extraordinary women.In 1932, Ruth Gruber earned her PhD—the youngest person ever to do so—with a stunning doctoral dissertation on Virginia Woolf. Published in 1935, the paper was the first-ever feminist critique of Woolf's work and inspired a series of correspondences between the two writers. It also led to Gruber's eventual meeting with Woolf, whi...

Finders Keepers is a gathering of Seamus Heaney's prose of three decades. Whether autobiographical, topical or specifically literary, these essays and lectures circle the central preoccupying questions: 'How should a poet properly live and write? What is his relationship to be to his own voice, his own place, his literary heritage and the contemporary world?'As well as being a selection from the poet's three previous collections of prose ( Preoccupations

Sir Frank Kermode is acknowledged as one of the greatest critics of our time, renowned for the wit humanity and good sense of his writing. Pleasing Myself brings together the very best of his shorter pieces, on topics ranging from Donne and Yeats to modern art and money.

His second book of cultural criticism, At the Pillars of Hercules sees Clive James take on artists from W. H. Auden to Lillian Hellman, and from T. S. Eliot to Norman Mailer, in a collection that confirmed his reputation as a writer of entertaining, insightful essays.Named for a now much-missed Soho pub that was long the regular haunt of literary Londoners, this collection sees James discuss contemporary poetry, aesthetics and the theory and practice of cr...

To consider comedy in its many incarnations is to raise diverse but related questions: what, for instance, is humour, and how may it be used (or abused)? When do we laugh, and why? What is it that writers and speakers enjoy - and risk - when they tell a joke, indulge in bathos, talk nonsense, or encourage irony? This Very Short Introduction explores comedy both as a literary genre, and as a range of non-literary phenomena, experiences and events. Matthew Bevis studies the classics of comic...

The title, The Government of the Tongue, carries suggestions of both monastic discipline and untrammelled romanticism, and is meant to raise an old question about the rights and status of poetic utterance itself. Should it be governed? Should it be the governor?Seamus Heaney here scrutinizes the work of several poets, British and Irish, American and European, whose work is responsive to such strains and tensions.

What is the connection between God and East Sheen? How do you talk your way out of an Albanian jail? Why do dictators love to make comic books? How does a missed penalty-kick lead to a bloody war? Theodore Dalrymple, a psychiatrist who gives expert witness in murder cases, has a passion for sideways thinking. In The Pleasure of Thinking he takes us on a witty and erudite voyage along the hidden pathways that bring ideas together. At once light-hearted and enlightening, it is an amusing fli...