James Hamilton-Paterson lives in Italy. His most recent novel, Cooking with Fernet Branca is published by Faber.
My father was born in China and no doubt I caught from him his own boyhood tingle at the idea of ships and their Empire routes, especially long ocean voyages by P&O liner. Excitement, homesickness, the magic of the word ‘Orient’: to a child growing up in South-East England in the 1940s and 1950s, such elements blended early into a near-poetry of longing for a vertical sun. By...
Early one morning two Februaries ago, I stood in shirtsleeves in the tiny bay of Crinan in the extreme west of Argyll. The sun was brilliant in a rinsed blue sky. On a nearby islet an unmoving white heron might have been a plaster model. Behind it shores and islands widened to the horizon. Everything was still. Before long the first clouds had appeared, and within fifteen minutes the islands...
There is a fine Scots word for the sale of the contents of a house, farm or factory: a ‘displenishment’. We have certainly witnessed the displenishment of Great Britain.
The Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal recently argued that great literature has no need of symbols: it simply presents life as it is. A symbol in a novel can act like a leech on a living body, sucking...
Take one housemaid, who interrupts you while you are making a ludicrously maladroit attempt to swaddle a stolen painting in brown paper. Fly into a sulk. Bundle the poor girl into your car, and...
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