In 1929, in his essay on Dante, T.S. Eliot wrote: But the question of what Dante ‘believed’ is always relevant. It would not matter, if the world were divided between those persons...
Wintry Mix The 6 a.m. January encaustic clouds are built in a waxy gray putty whizzing by with spots of luminous silvery crack-o’-the-world light coming through, an eerie...
Alice Munro doesn’t write much about her writing: there are only a few interviews, hardly any essays or journalistic pieces, and we don’t catch her holding forth about her literary...
When John le Carré published A Perfect Spy in 1986, Philip Roth, then spending a lot of time in London, called it ‘the best English novel since the war’. Not being such a fan of...
Language the contract Between self and nothing When bending to earth it Exchanges the sky for words Out walking on that Uncertain estuary border Where we found the beached conger – It was...
I could have taken the train into Rome and gone to an English-language bookshop – there’s even one at the railway station – to buy a copy of Michael Crichton’s new novel,
Retard Spoilage Animalcules heave their tackling, ladders of polysaccharides, onto meatmilkshrimp&creamy emulsions, sticking like putrefactive velcro. The refrigerator switches on in the...
Red Syncopated Green You’ve given away your temple, Lord, your altar-stone, dun flame of burning myrrh, oil poured in long libation, soaking into turf; smoke rising to your sky from...
Paul Muldoon excluded himself from Contemporary Irish Poetry, his 1986 Faber anthology, but he included a poem by Seamus Heaney that was dedicated to him. We don’t of course know why the...
Martin Amis’s newest book, House of Meetings, is a short novel that purportedly describes conditions inside a Soviet forced labour camp. A sick and malingering prisoner is confined to an...
Many readers can’t bear whimsy and never make it far into books containing cute animals and characters with funny names. I’m not wild about whimsy myself, and a first glance at Thomas...
Compared to boring old Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, we think, had a short life and a gay one. When not writing his sonorous verse, he was spying, preaching atheism, fighting and getting...
Giving offence has become an unfashionable sport, but Kingsley Amis belongs in its hall of fame, one of the all-time greats. When Roger Micheldene, the central character in his 1963 novel, One...
John Skelton should be one of the great figures of English poetry. He is widely regarded as the most significant poet in the 130 years between the death of Chaucer and the flourishing of Thomas...
Kathy Acker wrote 13 novels and published one collection of essays before her death from cancer, aged 53, in 1997. Born in New York, she began writing when she returned there in the early 1970s...
Alan Furst’s much-admired thrillers are set in Continental Europe during the Second World War and the years leading up to it. His heroes are more likely to be journalists, film producers or...
Murasaki – I imagined a dye the colour of mulberries. A burnet moth’s underwing. She brushes past Sei Shonagon. Sleeves in tension. Both brushes charged with silken resistance. When...
From the interior night of the unconscionably tall, arched doorway, the shadows commence a faint unnerving undulation; they wear an awful sheen, as if the shade has been interminably brushed...