Anyone who has read the inside pages of Indian newspapers over the past few decades will be familiar with the recurring stories of violent urban crime. Some concern ‘crimes of...
Cast: Prometheus, god of Foresight Govt (formerly Zeus), mute part Flare and Stench, two henchman of Govt Ocean, god of oceans Io, woman turned into a cow by jealous wife of Govt Hermes,...
Although the view over the bay is good, Rapallo has surely lost the charms it held for the celebrities of the past, including Ezra Pound and his friends. Drifting around it a few years ago, Roy...
The title of this novel comes from the Chinese national anthem: Arise, ye who refuse to be bondslaves! With our very flesh and blood We will build a new Great Wall! China’s masses have met...
Vladimir Brik, the hero of Aleksandar Hemon’s third book, The Lazarus Project, had an elderly uncle called Mikhal back in Bosnia-Herzegovina, who liked to be shown family photograph albums...
Sorting clothes for movie costume, chocolate suits of bull-market cut, slim blade ties ending in fringes, brimmed felt hats, and the sideburned pork-pie ones that served them. I lived then. The...
There was a moment in the senate When the orator and the administrator Stood a few inches apart, their cheeks puffed From the previous power point scoring, Suddenly grey and tired. This was...
‘Home,’ Mary suggests in Robert Frost’s 1914 poem ‘The Death of the Hired Man’, ‘is the place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take you...
to Ralph Savarese The early worm gets the bird – it’s morning in Australia. It’s strange to be so bilious so far away. Little to do with Australia, which so far as I can see...
The story of Belchamber’s publication is probably better known than the book itself, which, like its author, has suffered the ambiguous fate of becoming an accessory to the life of a more...
The ideal reader is all mind. Swept up in a virtual universe, she no longer notices hunger, heat or cold. Real readers are different. They need eyes to see the page and hands to turn it. Some...
Browning’s contemporaries agreed he was a genius, but they were not all sure he was a poet. Wilde’s quip – ‘Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning’ –...
Human versus Robot It keeps on doing its best, That reddish thing inside me Pumping-pumping against The obstinate, tortuous fankle Of pulpy valves and tubeworms. Are they up to it any more...
It would be surprising if millions of ordinary people turned out to be familiar with the Platonic Forms or Spinoza’s doctrine of nature, yet millions of waiters, nurses and truck drivers...
It was a curious set of circumstances that in 1820 drove James Cooper (the ‘middle surname’ Fenimore would not be added for another six years), the son of one of post-independence...
In 1997, three years before her death, Penelope Fitzgerald asked her American publisher, Chris Carduff, who had offered to send her any books she wanted, for a copy of Wild America by Roger Tory...
Computer games resemble novels to the extent that both are narrative art forms that most people, most of the time, interact with alone. On the other hand, most computer games are no longer...
This volume contains 30 broadcasts and 40 uncollected essays, talks and lectures written by E.M. Forster between his time as a 19th-century undergraduate and his candid old age, when, in his...