Table of Contents
Introduction vii
Acknowledgments xviii
Poetry for a Tiny Room 1
Spring's Fruits in Autumn 3
The Corruption of the Exotic 6
Why, This is Hell 13
On the End of Every Fork 16
Into the Mass Mangle 18
Bitter-sweet Savour 23
The Big Daddy of the Beats 25
The Seventeenth Novel 27
Here Parla Man Marcommunish 32
The Book is Not for Reading 35
The Comedy of Ultimate Truths 39
Europe's Day of the Dead 42
Surprise from the Grave 46
Last Exit to Brooklyn 48
A Good Read 53
Bless Thee, Bottom? 57
Like Mr Priestley, Enjoying It 63
The Waste Land 68
My Life and Times 79
On Lengthy Matters 83
Last of the Literary Dandies 86
Five-Finger Exercises 89
Creeping Towards Salvation 92
A Very Blasphemous Fallacy 96
Glittering Prizes 99
A Talent to Remember 102
Jong in Triumph 104
Partridge in a Word Tree 108
A Movie that Changed my Life 112
By-products of the Ink Trade 118
Pilgrimage 121
Finks and Winchells 125
The School of Jesuits 129
Last Embers of Modernism 132
Medieval Sherlock 135
The Lords of Limit 138
Locutions of Sex and Death 142
Why I Write 149
Still Life 152
The Anachronist Strikes Back 155
Spirit of Cervantes 158
Defector as Hero 161
Where Sex Meets Self-Improvement 164
The Academic Critic and the Living Writer 168
The Master of Erudite Silence 173
Verbal Subversions 177
Eye of a Stranger 182
Wilde with all Regret 185
Mr Gibbon and the Huns 189
The Literature Industry 196
The Man Who Invented Himself 200
Bunn in the Oven 205
A Strong Whiff of Kif from Tangier 208
The Life of Graham Greene 211
Joyce as Novelist 217
Can Art be Immoral? 231
Getting the Language Right 246
Stop the Clock on Violence 250
Confessions of the Hack Trade 254
Index 267
