You Said You Would Write Two strong coffees and an hour of unfocused staring, and now the hour rolls round to put on some clothes and then to take them off again and return to bed. Later, it will...
A woman lies in bed next to her husband, unable to sleep: tomorrow they must tell their children a secret, something ‘that will change all our lives’. What is it? For most of the...
Galaxidi Those golden hairs I’m stroking on your thigh I only get to glimpse in this Greek light and only here do claw-snags on my hand, (from grappling with our lunch of garavides, the...
‘A creative artist has to be painfully honest with himself,’ R.S. Thomas declared in his autobiography, Neb: He has to look as objectively as possible at his creations. What is the...
The penis, in the contemporary novel, has been a mighty matter, looming large. Who will forget the narrator of The Bell Jar seeing an adult penis for the first time and being both fascinated and...
He could dig no deeper than a grave, six feet perhaps of fractured soil, before the battering instrument began to turn upon itself. [It] sought to bury its body in the reluctant ground...
We can drop this building into a biscuit tin, all forty storeys, everything’s planned, down to the last inch; the pre-repairs, the pattern of charges: nitroglycerine, dynamite, RDX. We...
There is a peculiar intensity about some streets in Dublin which becomes more gnarled and layered the longer you live in the city and the greater the stray memories and associations you build up....
Edith Wharton’s ‘background’ – the word is her own – has always seemed improbable for a future novelist. Persistent rumours that she was not the daughter of George...
Every Saturday morning of my seventeenth and eighteenth years, I drove from Dover, where my family lives, to Folkestone, where I had a weekend job. I took an A road to avoid the lorries on the...
Susan Sontag intended something like the book which is now published as At the Same Time to be her final collection of essays. After that, says her son, David Rieff, in his foreword, she intended...
Lady’s Smock Past the odour-of-sanctity primroses in their tight nests of wrinkle-green by the well, and the violets, hardly daring to breathe, on the ditch above them. On to the wet fields...
A few years ago, a brilliant small book on detective fiction appeared in France called Qui a tué Roger Ackroyd? It got talked about at the time for demonstrating, rather neatly it was...
Night Music He stood on the roof with a saxophone playing across the road. It was dark, no one could see him. Passing cars – though few at this hour – drowned him out, but he swooped...
In interviews, Iain Banks has said that his new novel The Steep Approach to Garbadale was first imagined as a fantastical tale of multiple realities, in which characters would find themselves...
What counts as a novel? Any ‘fictitious prose work’ over fifty thousand words was E.M. Forster’s answer, in Aspects of the Novel. It’s a broad enough definition, in all...
There are many sources, from the Old Testament onwards, for Shakespeare’s understanding of an ocean that he may never have seen, or the ‘sea of air’ itself. But Horace, whose work he certainly knew,...
At Windsor it was the evening of the state banquet and as the president of France took his place beside Her Majesty, the royal family formed up behind and the procession slowly moved off and...