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...
Leaf through old New York Times reviews of the novels of Maude Hutchins – from the 1950s and early 1960s especially, when her reputation was at its height – and one is instantly...
Auden remarked that to read pornography in any other way than as a sexual stimulus is to be bored to tears. Crime fiction is similar: you read it for the story, and literary pretensions are...
In the Hotel Egalitarian the taps drip, here are containers to catch the water, the bath tub is big enough to hold a dog, but the dog is blind and bumps its nose against the taps and the beds are...
for Barbara Gowdy In Florence, circa 1460, Cosimo de’ Medici enclosed a mixed group of animals in a pen and invited Pope Pius II to attend the spectacle, which was meant to determine which...
Where other SF asks whether made-up entities (aliens, androids, emoting computers etc) deserve the respect we give real human beings, Philip K. Dick more often asks whether we ought to view ourselves...
‘Politics’ is a strange word, and the particular nature of its strangeness may explain why so many people feel confused by or alienated from political processes. It can refer...
Alfred Kazin published his first and best book of literary criticism, On Native Grounds, in 1942, when he was 27 years old. It told, in highly wrought, dramatic prose, the story of American...
A plop on the doormat and Volume 177 in the Library of America is in the house: Edmund Wilson’s writings from the 1930s and 1940s, including Classics and Commercials, The Triple Thinkers...