Some years ago, the novelist David Foster Wallace submitted himself to a long television interview with Charlie Rose, the PBS chat-show host. It was a terrific performance, and in it Wallace...
Lares I keep going back to that bird, snagged by a halter or skein of fibre or yarn and strung from the gutter of the opposite house where it quartered the wind, each bead of its spine and the...
Are there too many novels about missing Old Masters? Anyone who reads Jason Goodwin’s The Bellini Card might be forgiven for thinking so. It’s about a search for a portrait of Mehmet...
The opening scene of Night Work, Thomas Glavinic’s Viennese novel, recalls something Karl Kraus said about the city in 1914: Vienna was a ‘Versuchsstation des Weltuntergangs’,...
for John Burnside You’d know her house by the drawn blinds – by the cormorants pitched on the boundary wall, the black crosses of their wings hung out to dry. You’d tell it by...
Then … now … what difficulties here, for the mind.Samuel Beckett, Happy DaysThe Irish propensity for violence is well known; at least to the English.Charles Townshend, Political...
Planisphere Mysterious barricades, a headrest (of sorts), boarded the train at Shinjuku junction to the palpable consternation of certain other rubberneckers already installed in the observation...
When Raymond Williams died suddenly, aged 66, in January 1988, estimations of him were sharply divided. There were those who regarded him as a deservedly influential literary and cultural critic,...
In the early fifth century BCE, Bacchylides’ career was at its height: his services as poet, composer, choreographer and impresario were in demand throughout the Greek world. He delivered...
Over the reed bed the marsh harriers cavort for spring but far up and cruising above them, a different bird, a glist, a chequin in the fiery manganese air. Their male, in his resentment, pitches...
Towards the end of Bernhard Schlink’s best-known novel, The Reader, the narrator is pondering his future after taking his state exam in law. He has just seen his former lover, Hanna...
‘If ever a woman wanted a champion,’ Virginia Woolf wrote, ‘it is obviously Laetitia Pilkington.’ Norma Clarke intends to vindicate both the author and her Memoirs (she...
The prodigiously gifted artist and writer Joe Brainard died of Aids in a hospital in New York in May 1994, at the age of 52. He had long been revered in certain parts of the New York art and...
A cop has taken his wife to the movies to see something gentle by Ron Howard, but it finishes at the same time as Batman and Nightmare on Elm Street, Part 62, and as the three audiences collide,...
Once upon a time, able – or at least suitable – undergraduates were recruited to the Secret Intelligence Service by a nudge and a wink from a deep undercover agent posing as a French...
Doris Lessing is now saying she finds it more of a nuisance than a pleasure to have won the Nobel Prize. Considering the scope of her achievements it seems that a convergence of the twain –...
Shoot the freak Cold wind, boardwalk nearly empty You know you wanna A cluster of hip-hop Lubavitch punks, shirt tails out, talking tough You shoot him he don’t shoot back Keeper-flatties...
‘Netherland’ is an ambiguous word. It evokes, of course, the Netherlands inhabited by the Dutch, one of whom, Hans van den Broek, tells this story of a few late years spent in that...