Edith Wharton’s characters are always getting into trouble at the theatre. In The Age of Innocence, it’s the place where Newland Archer first meets the disgraced Countess Olenska (and...
Embodies Deep autumn & the mistake occurs, the plum tree blossoms, twelve blossoms on three different branches, which for us, personally, means none this coming spring or perhaps none on just...
In Jim Crace’s most celebrated novel, Quarantine, seven strangers spend a month together – or if not exactly together, then in close proximity to one another – in the Judaean...
The survival of poetry, especially if written before the invention of print, has often been a matter of luck or accident. Consigned to caves in the deserts of the Middle East, it might be...
for Ian Jack Lying in bed in the dark without heating. December 3rd and feeling warm, almost too warm, I hear the window give that rattle-burp it only ever does when the wind is fierce outside....
Poets need to dig in. This involves psychological concentration, a focus on the act of writing, but also on how to limber up for writing: they must be open to the often accidental stimuli that...
It’s my birthday today. The LRB has sent me a copy of The Birthday Book, which the Roman scholar Censorinus wrote for his friend Caerellius in 238 AD, and which has recently been translated...
On a 700-foot-thick shelf of Cretaceous pink sandstoneNel mezzo … Sixth floor, turn right at the elevator ‘The hotel of the century’Elegant dining, dancing, solarium Around the...
Nuclear Each morning as I round the bend, the same shock – that flash of river light, the bridge, the cooling towers – always that first sight gasp as if they’ve been dropped...
At one moment in Thomas Pynchon’s novel named after them, Mason and Dixon pause to wonder what history’s verdict on their most famous work is likely to be, its ‘assessment of...
Like Victorian children Beatrix Potter’s characters often live in the hidden parts of a house and their excursions into forbidden areas, the parlour or the kitchen or the vegetable garden, are fraught...
In Nell Freudenberger’s first novel, Yuan Zhao, a Chinese artist, is invited to Los Angeles as a visiting scholar at St Anselm’s School for Girls. He is famous for the experimental...
In fact Odysseus would have been here long before now but it seemed to his mind more profitable to go to many lands acquiring stuff. For Odysseus knows profit over and above mortal men nor could...
Dominion Rise up! we heard their war-cry – Levitation! the trembling leaves kept sighing –Levitation! Then Hurry Harry abandoned the way of the raccoon and beaver, and felt his heart...
All good Protestants are supposed to believe that when they read the Bible properly, the Holy Ghost assists them. So what happens when a good Protestant writes with the same assistance? Is the...
Henrik Ibsen died in 1906, acknowledged as the founder of modern drama. Today, he is the most performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare. It was an unlikely success story. Born in 1828 in...
Oedipus the riddle-breaker finds himself caught in a riddle; the coils of the enigma ‘What am I?’ tighten around him until he comes to the horrific knowledge that he is himself...
Cormac McCarthy has offered us nightmares before. In Outer Dark (1968) he conjured a twisted version of the Nativity in which a child is conceived in incest, abandoned in the woods, sought for...