If you had taken a walk in Paris last autumn, you might have come across grinning cats graffitied on walls and buildings. The person responsible for this was Chris Marker: cats play an important...
Wilfred Thesiger was born in Addis Ababa in 1910 and spent the first nine years of his life in Abyssinia. Visions of Abyssinian barbarism and splendour were to stay with him for the rest of his...
Christine Brooke-Rose, being in her eighties and suffering many intractable illnesses and disabilities, recognises that her life must be near its end. Since her retirement from the University of...
I owe what sense I have of the power of the word to a man whose power depended on words failing him. The first time I heard the term ‘West Brit’, it was spat out by a florid-faced...
In the membership roll of the worshipful guild of enabling wives, the name of Martha Freud ranks with the greatest: Mrs Noah, Mrs Darwin, Mrs Marx, Mrs Joyce, Mrs Nabokov, Mrs Clinton, and their...
For a long time, Henry Roth’s silence was considered one of the most resonant in modern American literature. Ralph Ellison and J.D. Salinger were his only competition. When Call It Sleep...
He thought they looked like two soft-boiled eggs, others preferred to call them poached. Either way, any attempt to describe the appearance of Peter Lorre must deal with those eyes. What teeth...
Let me begin with a motor trip in 1944 by two scientists down the valley from Lord Mountbatten’s headquarters in Kandy to the jungle. The younger of the two remembers what his companion...
Trieste, it has been said, is a nowhere of sorts: unreal, isolated, out of time, attractive to exiles, unknown to almost everybody else. So it was an apt city to serve as the final home of a man...
The lie is told to a man he meets on the road; it is America, fall, the mid-1990s, when he stops to pick up a hitch-hiker in Upper New York State. It is almost the day of the dead, and he is tired,...
The pleasures of piety are infinite and exquisite and probably nowhere more easily had these days than in the rock ’n’ roll business, or in Hollywood. On record, and on stage, and up...
Physically huge but strangely weightless, Fabian Lloyd lived a life of indefinition – aliases, disguises, blurrings of fact and fantasy. He was a kind of illusionist, his greatest feat the creation of...
The subtitle Hilary Spurling has given to the second half of her biography of Henri Matisse is upbeat and triumphant, in line with orthodox interpretations of the painter’s career:...
In a famous poem by Hopkins, a child called Margaret is rebuked for grieving over the fall of leaves. Leaves fall; stuff happens; we get over it; or, to stay with Hopkins’s idiom, the heart...
There is an awkward period in the lives of clothes, furniture and writers, when they become something more than dated but something less than a piece of history. We call things that have reached...
On 9 February, an exhibition of remarkable new photographs by Josef Hoflehner opens at the Atlas Gallery in London. The pictures show interiors of the base camp huts built and lived in between...
When I read for the English Bar in the 1960s, the legal history lecturer stopped when he reached 1649 and explained that he was now moving directly to 1660, because everything that had happened...
Of all the pre-textual bits and pieces lying like speed humps in the road of an impatient reader – epigraphs, ‘author’s notes’, prefaces, expansive acknowledgments to a...