Blake Morrison’s On Memoir is out now.
The epigraph to Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel is taken from Jung: ‘Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.’ This might serve for any of Strout’s books, which repeatedly touch on loneliness and its causes....
At the start of Flashlight, the main character, Louisa, is a stroppy ten-year-old. She’s sent to a child psychologist, Dr Brickner, on account of her misdeeds at school in California (‘defiance, disruptive behaviour, deception, peer-to-peer conflict, tardiness, truancy, larceny’), but quickly shuts him out: ‘I don’t like people asking me questions.’ He...
Ionce shared a green room at a literary festival with an elderly American actor who said he didn’t know where he was, why he’d been invited or what he was supposed to do. I felt uncomfortable listening to him and the organisers were in a panic: how would he handle being interviewed on stage? The situation was farcical but I imagined that if anyone took the risk and wrote about...
The theft in Theft isn’t a theft at all. Badar, working as a servant boy in a house in Dar es Salaam in the 1990s, is accused of adding groceries to the household’s weekly bill and selling them to accomplices. Nothing about Badar suggests he’d be capable of such a crime, and Haji and Raya, his affable master and mistress (terms they reject: ‘What is this Bwana...
The mouse plague in Queensland and New South Wales in 2020-21 was overshadowed by Covid-19. But the plague within the plague was no small matter. Heavy rain after a long drought meant bumper grain crops, which colonies of mice devastated. The use of poison (zinc phosphide coated on wheat and scattered around pastures) had little effect: there were always more mice. Residents suffered no...
Towards the end of And When Did You Last See your Father? (1993), Blake Morrison says:Stand them up against grief, and even the greatest poems, the greatest paintings, the greatest novels...
Blake Morrison begins his account of the murder of James Bulger with a delicate diversion into the story of the Children’s Crusade. The year 1212: at Saint-Denis, a boy of 12 begins to...
It’s a race against time, but, as this century totters to its close, we might, in the final few years, catch up with the arithmetic and discover that it’s the 20th century we’ve...
In 1972 the final issue of Ian Hamilton’s Review was given over to a symposium on ‘The State of Poetry’. Only fifteen years on, it has the flavour of a yellowed historical...
The Great War was the war of the great war poets. Was ‘the war to end all wars’ also the war to end all war poetry? The best part of Jon Stallworthy’s introduction to his Oxford...
‘New’ poetry can mean two things. When Ezra Pound said ‘make it new’ he was willing the advent of Modernism, the birth of a consciousness transformed by the...
It is a current preoccupation on the Left, more fashionable now among many students of English than Post-Structuralism, that English Literature as an academic subject is a conspiracy of the...
It seemed to be happening only yesterday, but Blake Morrison was born in 1950, and for him the Movement is something you have to work on in a library. So it suddenly comes to seem rather remote,...
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