Ian Jack

It is the story of Sterne's fictional travel through both countries, particularly France. Sterne made two trips within the continent, in 1762-64 and 1765-66, but the book is not about his errands, but those of parson Yorick's (a character in "Tristram Shandy"). With a less acid and outrageous humor than in his previous work, Sterne anyway mixes the picaresque with an ironic and, frequently, hilarious philosophical irony. Yorick begins by trying to...

"Keats and the Mirror of Art" is a study in the ways of the imagination. When he stumbled on the visual source of a key-passage in one of the early poems, the author began to suspect that one of Keats's principal sources of inspiration has been neglected by modern critics. To make sure that he was on the right lines he began by investigating the cultural milieu in which the poet lived and wrote. He found that Keats had been surrounded by painters...