If you want to know what is happening in the mind of the average teenage boy you must follow the action of his thumbs, because the eager digits that might once have flicked through the pages of
Out of the mouths of babes; apple of the eye; fire and brimstone; out of joint; sleep the sleep of death; sweeter than honey and the honeycomb; whiter than snow; oh that I had wings like a dove for...
The Reading If I turn round now I’ll be back at school, arranging the chairs in the Library with Briggs and Napier. Briggs is chair monitor for readings. He’s flicking through a copy...
Patience has been the matter of Annie Dillard’s writing for thirty years and more: patience and watchfulness and humility, together with a good deal of meditation (some of it conducted...
from the cadaver beginning to show through the skin of the day. The future without...
I first read Letter to Patience in a mud-walled bar a few hundred miles away from the mud-walled bar near Zaria, in northern Nigeria, where John Haynes’s poem is set. It opens with an...
Baudelaire pretended to be surprised that anyone could think of Balzac as a realist. It had always seemed to him, he said, that the novelist was ‘a passionate visionary’. The only...
The trouble is that the Norse myths, and the literary and artistic clichés derived from them, have become part of the cultural wallpaper, like flying saucers and earth-mothers and ley lines and...
First, a somewhat spittle-laden squawk: how one positively slavers for a good biography of the astonishing French artist known as Claude Cahun (1894-1954). Mention her in conversation and you are...
On the Petaluma Road, in the former Gold Rush territory of Northern California, a man inherits a farm, marries a miner’s daughter called Lydia Mendez and adopts a four-year-old boy from a...
The collected works of Luis de Góngora y Argote were not published until a few months after his death in 1627. Although the volume had been prudently dedicated to the inquisitor general,...
Cooking for One I put five small potatoes in a saucepan, hold it under the cold tap till they’re covered with water, add a squirt of washing-up liquid. – There’s a man who likes...
In the opening pages of Plato’s Republic Cephalus tells Socrates that when old men of his acquaintance get together they tend to spend their time bemoaning the lost pleasures of youth....
I Spindrift of grunion spume in moonlight Granular, sorrel-coloured, ammoniac Upon the tide’s retreat A meniscus of foam hissing in sand The milt bores deep II His presence was more than...
The earliest poem collected in Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box, Alice Quinn’s edition of Elizabeth Bishop’s miscellaneous drafts and fragments, opens: I introduce Penelope Gwin, A...
The Ugly I love you as I love the Hatchetfish, the Allmouth, the Angler, the Sawbelly and Wolf-eel, the Stoplight Loosejaw, the Fangtooth; all our sweet bathypelagic ones, and especially those...
In 1943, chemists at Harvard came up with a cheap and simple way to thicken petrol into a gel. Not only was it easier to use in flame-throwers in this non-drip form, but it would conveniently...
Between leaving school and going to Cambridge, Ted Hughes did his National Service in the RAF. Writing from RAF West Kirby, in the Wirral, to a friend, Edna Wholey, in 1949 –...