Adam Thorpe

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

Under Witchwood

Adam Thorpe, 10 September 1992

A modern witch is a Witch. The upper case denotes a self-consciousness born of safer times: Witchcraft is now a minority faith to be taken seriously (at least in the States), and there is even a Witches’ League for Public Awareness. They need it. For the broomsticks, black cats, green-hued hags with pointy hats – all the paraphernalia people remember from childhood – have...

Poem: ‘Twitchers’

Adam Thorpe, 8 September 1994

For every booming bittern there are ten, for every cliff-stacked gannet mass

there is at least one with his clingfilmed lunch-pack, wringing his socks on St Kilda.

This is surety of sorts. That the index finger will go on twitching till the loch

gives up its greylag, the moor its merlin, that even the chough has its hangers-on

grim-jawed on outcrops where the breakers’ sting assures Him...

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...

We know you’ve got a thing about us, scuffing the earth at our feet, giving us a voice. Like this.

We know about the groans we’ve heard, the yelps in moonlight, rumours of progeny. Bellies keep pressing us; we decline.

Thunder on the moor and your effeteness assured, we think of us as crown whetted on the storm, not bald queans.

We know about the influx of coach parties; the way...

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...

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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