Great artists are always far-seeing. They easily avoid the big stumbling blocks of fact. They rely on their own simplicity and vision. It is fact-fetichism that has given us those scores and scores of American books on America, the works of sociologists, anthropologists, topical 'problem' hunters, working-parties and statisticians, which in the end leave us empty. Henry James succeeds because he rejects information. He was himself the only information he required.

Most comic writers like to think they could play it straight if only their public would let them. Waugh is able to be grave without difficulty for he has alway…

Wilson was not, in the academic sense, a scholar or historian. He was an enormous reader, one of those readers who are perpetually on the scent from book to bo…

Prep school, public school, university: these now tedious influences standardize English autobiography, giving the educated Englishman the sad if fascinating a…

You advise me, too, not to stray far from the ground of experience, as I become weak when I enter the region of fiction; and you say, 'real experience is peren…

As we cast our gaze on the tumbling sea A vision came o'er me Of thundering hooves and beating wings In clouds above.

We should not allow ourselves to believe that writers like Poe have more imagination than those who are content with describing things as they really are. It i…