Literature & Criticism

We are left, a third of the way through The Disappearers, with a feeling of absolute outrage, when outrage is no more than anger in the key of helplessness. Outrage leads nowhere; violence freezes time...

Literary criticism is a supremely occasional skill, where you have to be bold enough to operate where there aren’t any clear rules and make up your own, and decide for yourself what you think, and...

In Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch it isn’t only the author but his characters who can change history. Iris and Geoff learn of a portal that was discovered by a 17th-century alchemist, Hieronymus...

door in the cloudsor was it a holesmall bird on the scotch pine’s branchnorth wind, thundera raspberry summerthe thrushes are backthe flooded cityawash in insurerswho’s getting...

A thread of light travelled through the beadWith the map of the world on it.No one’s keeping the plot I said.The marriage plot, man versusWilderness plot – there are more,But I forget....

In February​ 1840, Alfred Tennyson was in a bad way, argumentative and restless. Thomas Carlyle, whose own public career was taking off, doubted how far Tennyson would rise: ‘He is often unwell;...

Quite naturally, as with any truly original writer, one had to learn how to read Firbank. A certain clue-seeking and backtracking habit was necessary, and part of the fun. The truth dawns on you, and...

so how’s it going with the Parkinson’s? you say and I startto say every moment bleeding to death around me but thetherapist cautioned me yesterday don’t say dread call...

For Stewart, this is what poetic process is: the closely observed emergence of empirical knowledge out of chaos, confusion, darkness. But she is not only a theorist; she has always alternated books of...

Joyce stands out​ among the great modernist writers for his belief in tolerance, equality, democracy, progress and the preciousness of the everyday. If he is outrageously experimental, he is also...

‘What’s the point of an alien artefact you can recognise?’ Harrison asked in Wish I Was Here. ‘As a branch of the fantastic, science fiction should accept that its currency is...

Gibbon’s new and self-created version of the modernist sentence mixes Scots and English to resemble ‘a meandering, live thought-process’, as Ali Smith puts it: ‘poetic and realist...

The wilted season: peacocks drop their tails,The vines drop leavesAnd wear a bunch of raisins on their sleeves.The scoured sky pales.Cicadas grate and grate the airLike pencil sharpeners....

Strout’s characters live in sociable communities, mostly small coastal towns, where everyone knows everyone else’s business. They gossip, reminisce, pontificate, form unlikely friendships,...

Few writers could match Verne in sales or in spin-offs, including the hugely successful theatre productions. Popular success did not, however, translate to literary prestige. Verne was largely ignored...

Gorky was the designated mourner for a vanished moment in Russian culture. He wanted socialism or democracy but he no longer wanted Bolshevism, which seemed to him psychopathically preoccupied with power....

Bainbridge chose to be seen as a woman who lived on her own terms, but that wasn’t always the way she felt, and she came to resent the persona she had created for herself. She was an actor before...

John Berryman often arrived at lectures and seminars by taxi from whichever rehab clinic was treating him, and afterwards returned there exhausted, his shirt drenched in sweat after delivering his interpretation...