Adam Thorpe

Adam Thorpe’s most recent collection of poetry, Voluntary, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Letter

Mistake

30 November 2006

It was with horror that I saw that an error on the part of my finger or mind had substituted an ‘l’ for a ‘b’ in my poem ‘Dromleg’. The stone circle, probably the best-known in Ireland, is of course called Drombeg.
Letter

Recolonisation Issues

14 December 2000

R.W. Johnson suggests (LRB, 14 December 2000) that Africa’s present misery is its own fault, or the fault of its leaders, and that we should consider ‘recolonisation’ as a way out of the ‘impasse’. This is a little like asking the burglars back in to sort out your insurance. In something like eighty years we Europeans managed to screw up Africa’s political structure, kill much of its population...
Letter

Does London exist?

4 February 1999

Andrew Saint’s assertion (LRB, 4 February) that a hundred years ago few ‘had much good to say about Britain’s capital’ is an over-simplification. The general approach in belles-lettres of the time (and not much has changed since) was to match London’s essentially muddled or aporic nature with the intimate muddle of the human heart; the London one loves is the London one knows. This explains...

Squeak: Adam Thorpe’s new novel

Jonathan Heawood, 18 August 2005

Adam Thorpe’s first novel, Ulverton (1992), was set in a fictional downland village, and traced its history from 17th-century isolation to M4 dormitory town. Thorpe told the story of this...

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‘You,’ the mother of six-year-old Hugh informs him, ‘are the only white child in the whole of West and Central Africa, that I know of.’ The remote outpost of Empire, made...

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Palimpsest History

Jonathan Coe, 11 June 1992

In her recent collection Stories, Theories and Things, Christine Brooke-Rose was casting around for a generic term under which to classify such diverse novels as Midnight’s Children, Terra...

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