Glyn Maxwell

There’s nothing like a book about music to remind the reader of the silence. Nothing else insists so emphatically on what we are usually happy to forget: that, during the hours we read, our lives have gone quite still, and we are taking a stranger’s word for the world. A landscape, a face, a building, a painting, even a taste, an odour, an emotion: we will readily accept words for...

Vladimir Brik, the hero of Aleksandar Hemon’s third book, The Lazarus Project, had an elderly uncle called Mikhal back in Bosnia-Herzegovina, who liked to be shown family photograph albums and to get his young nephew to point out who everyone was: ‘And here is Aunt Olga, smiling … And that’s you … And there is me.’ ‘Nobody ever found it...

Susan Faludi’s book ‘Stiffed’ is about ‘The Betrayal of the Modern Man’.* What follows is an interview with the ‘Modern Man’.

Can you share any childhood memories with us?

Well ... one night I was lying in bed, pretending to be asleep, waiting for my father to come in. He’d promised that he’d reveal to me a miraculous inheritance.

What was...

The boys were risen right out of their seats By the wind the whistle cued, they pushed along In the damp and heavy-coated crowd away From all of it, away from this one song The man beside them knew. Rough cigarettes He’d prodded at them while he had his say About the action. Now where was he gone, They wondered. Not so far: he’d only paused A sec to cup a hand to...

As blank as scripture to a ruling class Discussed in hells they do not think exist, Cracked and abandoned to the slicing grass       And disabusing dust, A movie screen shows nothing in a morning mist.

Here’s where the happy endings were never had, Or, like the long and lonely, never shown. No one rode to the rescue of who was good,...