To make things clear, yes, Me Cheeta: The Autobiography is a celebrity memoir, to shelve alongside such classics as Mickey Rooney’s Life Is Too Short and Katharine Hepburn’s modestly...
Louis MacNeice, it was sometimes said, was always in the pub but never really of it. Much the same could be said of Patrick Hamilton, who was best known in his lifetime for his stage chillers
1 January, Yorkshire. A grey dark day and raining still, as it has been for the last week. Around four it eases off and we walk up by the lake. The waterfall at the top of the village is...
‘Prends l’éloquence et tords-lui son cou!’ Verlaine resonantly, and eloquently, declared in his ‘Art poétique’ of 1874. The line must have lodged in...
Saturday Night Out of the impenetrable wood Elizabeth Bishop And young girls shall gather to dance on the highways under petals of light that float from their shoulders and dip into lotioned...
1. I lie in bed, watching you dress yourself in nudity for your part in a story you are about to tell me. Once upon a time, you seem to say, there was a woman who took off all her clothes and...
John Updike’s unfailing geniality and fluent industry appear to get on a fair number of nerves, of which he’s slyly aware. (Is there anything he isn’t slyly aware of? That foxy...
‘At night,’ Roland Barthes once wrote, ‘the adjectives come back.’ It’s an eerie and sobering thought for writers who have been trying to clean up their act during...
Carlo Collodi knew that real children are not so innocent. No matter. The power of the Disney Pinocchio myth has little to do with the business of becoming honest, brave and unselfish – the surface moral....
Somewhere between the supernatural, which presumed a belief in God, and the uncanny, which saw inexplicable, dreadful or wonderful things as the dream products of the mind and, often, of personal disturbance,...
(after Tacitus) Turning to Caius Petronius, there are a few things about him that deserve To be remembered: he liked to sleep all day, then devote his nights To business – or pleasure. Most...
In 2006 the Wall Street Journal declared Qiu Xiaolong’s first novel, Death of a Red Heroine (2000), one of the top five ‘political novels’ of all time for its indictment of...
The greatest long poem in modern English letters began its life, unexpectedly, in the winter of 1798, in an uncomfortable lodging in Goslar, Lower Saxony, where Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy...
Like a throw of shot silk, its blue brilliance calmed by the iron, completed, so you can clearly see the alternative versions. This is the first thing,The first thing you feelWhen you happen to...
Every November, the books pages of British newspapers perform what ought to be a helpful service: they present lists of the best books of the year, to remind us of what we missed. It’s part...
St Hubert and the Deer He has come to a halt in the woods: snow on the path and everything gone to ground...
Robert Edric specialises in historical backwaters. His novels, 19 to date, unfold in isolated fishing villages, colonial outposts or Alpine spa towns. What these places have in common is that...
Every evening smoke blows in from the sea, sea smoke, ghost vapour of lost frigates, sunken destroyers. It hangs over the eucalyptus grove, cancels the hills, curls around garbage sacks outside...