Jon Day

There aren’t many novels with exclamation marks in their titles. Used without irony – as in Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! – they strive too hard, leaving us no room for manoeuvre. Absalom, Absalom! by Faulkner and Look at the Harlequins! by Nabokov, on the other hand, are more subtle, creating some distance between us and their tellers, if not their tales. Karen...

‘I have forgotten my umbrella,’ Nietzsche wrote in the margins of an unpublished manuscript. Whether he wanted to remind himself of the phrase, which he put in inverted commas, or of the umbrella itself, isn’t known. ‘It is always possible that it means nothing at all or that it has no decidable meaning,’ Derrida commented. ‘What if Nietzsche was only...

The day​ after Brexit, in need of distraction, I joined nine other volunteers at a pub on the bank of the River Lea in East London to count eels. The European eel is critically endangered, and annual counts have taken place on London’s rivers since 2005. We were met by representatives of the Canal and River Trust and an ichthyologist from London Zoo named Joe. Across the river there...

He was​ the greatest long-distance runner of the mid-20th century, but when he ran Emil Zátopek looked ridiculous. His face was a mask of pain and his head lolled to the side, as though his neck couldn’t hold it up. The American sportswriter Red Smith said he ‘ran like a man with a noose around his neck, the most frightful horror spectacle since Frankenstein, on the verge...

In​ a 1932 article for the Daily Herald entitled ‘What It Feels Like to Be an Enemy’, Wyndham Lewis described his morning routine. After a breakfast of ‘a little raw meat, a couple of blood oranges, a stick of ginger, and a shot of vodka – to make one see Red’, he wrote:

I make a habit of springing up from the breakfast table and going over in a rush to the...