Six years ago, at the First Committee Meeting of the International Necronautical Society, an organisation set up to explore ‘the cultural parameters of death’ – why not? –...
Flying Horses Neighbours leaned out of windows To see a pretty girl pass by While bombs fell out of the sky And flames lit up the mirrors. Our building was a rollercoaster We took a ride in every...
The Gathering – Anne Enright’s fourth novel, and her best – is aware of its heritage, of the books that have gone before it. It makes use of familiar signals and motifs. It is...
You were telling me a story of your great-grandmother’s over a bottle of Burgundy by a bubbling fire. Deep in the Forest of Language there dwelt a manikin not called Rumpelstiltskin. His...
In Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism – a difficult book, but, it seems increasingly clear, the most important critical work of the last twenty years – Fredric...
The sun’s hinge on the burnt horizon has woken the sealed lake, leaving a sleeve of sound. No wind, just curved plates of air re-shaping under the trap-ice, straining to give; the groans and...
People think they like reading Jonathan Coe’s novels for any number of reasons. For their satirical sharpness, for instance: What a Carve Up! (1994) – the carve-up in question...
A large part of the reason for the continuing democratic vigour of the American novel is that the great wave of Modernism was no more than a ripple by the time it reached New England’s...
In 1989, I was invited to a party in London. I was a graduate student at Oxford, supposedly writing a dissertation on D.H. Lawrence but actually doing nothing of the sort. Instead, I’d...
As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness of either of them . . . my first fancies regarding what they were like were unreasonably derived from their...
Sunbreak. The sky opens its magazine. If you look hard it is a...
One event dominated Tennessee Williams’s life: his sister Rose’s bilateral prefrontal lobotomy, performed on 13 January 1943, two years before The Glass Menagerie, the play he forged...
A new novel by J.M. Coetzee is always an event, although often a disconcerting one. ‘Disconcerting’ will be too polite a word for many readers, who can’t bear the chill that...
Wool and War after the Latin of Florentius Wilson of Elgin (c.1500-47) Never mind our European allies. The Arab snuggles into wool. It’s worn By peoples round the delta where the Nile...
Sex seems to have been momentarily eclipsed as a topic for French literature, giving way to something sexier: trauma. Camille Laurens and Marie Darrieussecq, two authors who until now have shared...
Despite his eighty years (1893-1973) and many publications, an air of incompletion lingers about the work of Carlo Emilio Gadda. His most popular novel, That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, is an...
Voguish these days for weddings, Chiswick’s Thames-side parish church has seen its share of august burials. So its large graveyard, a stone’s throw from the howl of the Great West...
What are poets good for? Are all attempts to speak of ‘the function of poetry’, with that reductive definite article, doomed to pompous failure? In response to these questions, the...