All the wrong turnings that have brought me here – debts, divorce, a court trial, and now a forced exile in this city and this drinking cell,Zum Schwarzen Ferkel, The Black Porker: neither...
‘We had mixed feelings,’ the voice that narrates Then We Came to the End reports from time to time – needlessly, really, since mixed feelings, and the absurdity and awkwardness...
The Maoist rebellion that raged through Peru during the 1980s and early 1990s is estimated to have claimed seventy thousand lives. The Shining Path was brutal in its methods, favouring summary...
In 1934, one of the most disturbing aspects of the Red Menace and the creeping influence of Moscow – for the Daily Mail at least – was a public school magazine called Out of Bounds....
Midwinter. Dead of. I own you says my mind. Own what, own whom. I look up....
Don DeLillo’s new novel makes a direct but counterintuitive approach to the destruction of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. It is anti-sentimental: constructed in short...
When Jonathan Lethem was born, in 1964, his mother had dropped out of college and was piercing ears with a pin and ice-cube in Greenwich Village, where she ran with a crowd of folksingers...
When A.E. Housman failed his final examinations at Oxford he went to London to work as a clerk in the Patent Office. After ten years of that, he was appointed, at the age of 33, to the chair of...
Old vendettas, and no details of them, or whose heads were on the spikes. I don’t want to go down this sad, steep street, sidestepping vendors of handbags and leather belts, only to be...
The first reports of a gruesome disaster reached Paris on 5 September 1816. A French frigate, the Medusa, had run aground on the notorious and poorly mapped Arguin Bank off the coast of West...
One of the great pleasures of reading Tony Harrison is the sense of quick passage between worlds, the sudden switch from the local to the international and back. At one moment he immerses us in a...
Alun Lewis is usually remembered as a war poet or, more precisely, as a soldier poet. ‘All Day It Has Rained’ is familiar to those who know nothing else about its author and to some...
How many Hamlets would you like? A play of that name was performed in the late 1580s. It was probably bloody and Senecan, and probably written by Thomas Kyd. Another one (probably...
Farewell My Lovely A really good detective never gets married. Raymond Chandler I’d gotten used to that roomy grin, the face like a bag of facts, the flank round as a pony’s, and the...
For the past three decades, Mikhail Bakhtin has been more of an industry than an individual. Not only an industry, in fact, but a flourishing transnational corporation, complete with jet-setting...
Nearly 25 years ago, when Valentino Achak Deng was six years old, his village in Southern Sudan was razed by the murahaleen, paramilitaries working for the government in Khartoum to suppress the...
You’d figure the hawk for an isolate thing, commanding the empyrean, taking his ease in the thermals and wind until that retinal flick, the plunge and shriek – cruelly perfect at what...
At the end of David Dabydeen’s poem ‘Coolie Odyssey’ (1988), the poet, deracinated by education, distance and time from the dirt-poor ancestors he is elegising, considers his...