Table of Contents
The ball is free to roll -- Francophonia -- Going north -- Understanding the French -- Never again again -- Something about Malaysia -- The Brigg -- Winterreise -- The art of liking Rome -- France and myself -- Farewell (& hello again) Manchester -- Life (of a sort) in Venice -- Manchester as was -- Cut off -- The royals -- England in Europe -- After this our exile -- Thoughts on time -- The Jew and the joke -- The British temper -- The world doesn't like Gipsies -- What makes comedy comic? -- Thoughts on the Thatcher decade -- Dirty pictures -- God and God's voices -- Success -- The celtic sacrifice -- Shaw as musician -- Ring -- The literature of the British from 1900 to 1982 -- All about Alice -- Flann O'Brien a prefatory word -- Artist's life -- Elgar non áe volgare -- The gaudiness of Gaudi -- Orson Welles : the artist as bricoleur -- A clockwork orange resucked -- The brotherhood -- Why were the revolutionaries reactionary? -- Shakespeare the poet -- The oriental diseases of fiction -- Playing Hamlet with Hamlet -- Graham Greene : a reminiscence -- Craft and crucifixion, the writing of fiction -- Strega in do maggiore -- First novel -- Joyce as centenarian -- Great Scott? -- Rudyard Kipling and the white man's burden -- Domesday -- Lorenzo -- Quiet pioneer -- Good Gluck -- Unravelling Ravel -- God struck with his wind -- Celebrating T.S. Eliot, part I and II -- Lord Olivier -- Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1844-1889 -- Two hundred years of the Bounty -- Our eternal Holmes -- The cold eye of Yeats -- Father of the OED -- Chaplin on stage -- Evelyn Waugh : a revaluation -- James Joyce : fifty years after -- Tolkien : a centenary -- Virginia Woolf mortua 1941 -- Marilyn.