Blake Morrison

Ma,​ as everyone calls her, is exasperating to her family. Eighty years old and recently widowed, she refuses to get out of bed. Despite the entreaties of her son Bade (in whose Delhi house she lives), and pleas from her daughter Beti, daughter-in-law Bahu and grandson Sid, she lies with her face to the wall, as if readying herself for death. After 170 pages of inactivity, she’s more...

There​ is a terrific photo of A.E. Coppard on Brighton racecourse one Sunday morning in 1901. Dressed in running gear (white shorts, sleeveless vest, bare feet in leather running shoes so thin they look more like ballet pumps), he’s down on his haunches, leaning forward, waiting for the starting gun. There are no competing runners nearby; he was obviously posing for the camera. But the...

Among the victims​ of Alex and his droogs in A Clockwork Orange is an author living in a country cottage. They don’t just do him over but tear up the pages of the book he has been typing out, ‘so that the writer veck started to platch like his life’s work was ruined’. The gangs in Kay Dick’s They (first published in 1977, fifteen years after Burgess’s...

As​ well as survivor’s guilt there is the guilt of the non-combatant – the shame of missing out, a feeling experienced even by those who, for reasons of age, could never have taken part. The interwar generation of British writers (those, like Auden and Isherwood, too young to serve in the First World War) suffered from this. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, their main...

‘Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged,’ Virginia Woolf wrote, disparaging the kind of fiction associated with Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy and H.G. Wells. It’s a proposition that might appeal to Simon Okotie. But before deciding whether it has merit he would want to see whether an apparently symmetrical arrangement of gig-lamps might not, on close...