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...
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...