David Lassman, the director of the Jane Austen Festival in Bath (Regency dress parade, bonnet-making workshops, ‘Tea with Mr Darcy’), submitted opening chapters and plot synopses of...
This is a miniature dictionary of the invented English in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon’s charming, flawed and exhausting new novel: bik (Yiddish: bull) –...
Misha Vainberg, like a twisted 21st-century Whitman, contains multitudes. Son of the 1238th richest man in Russia. Graduate of Accidental College in the American Midwest, with a degree in...
During 2005, while Nigel Cliff was writing his wonderful book about the Astor Place riot, I too visited a couple of the archives he consulted, namely the New York Public Library for the...
Tate Water If you ask how a colour might come about consider the enigma of water determined by sky, and by water I don’t mean pool or rain barrel but the wide expanse of sea or lake. As...
It would be nice to say that Graham Greene just appeared one day in Yonda, the leprosy settlement in the Equateur Province of the then Belgian Congo where I was the doctor, stepping off the...
The confessional mode in literature has an uncomplicated appeal for both writers and readers: the unburdening of guilt, vicarious or otherwise. But as Tobias Wolff cautioned in his mordant memoir...
I The lake had been drained that night and filled with sky instead. We stood on the jetty as if on a summit, looking down on a fathomless depth of cloud. Sky overhead, sky at our feet like deep...
After great rain. Gradually you are revealing yourself to me. The lesson carves...
Of all the great English poets, Dryden must be the least enjoyed. Once honoured ‘rather in the stiffness than in the strength of his eminence’, he was soon ‘laid carefully away...
All the wrong turnings that have brought me here – debts, divorce, a court trial, and now a forced exile in this city and this drinking cell, Zum Schwarzen Ferkel, The Black Porker: neither...
‘We had mixed feelings,’ the voice that narrates Then We Came to the End reports from time to time – needlessly, really, since mixed feelings, and the absurdity and awkwardness...
The Maoist rebellion that raged through Peru during the 1980s and early 1990s is estimated to have claimed seventy thousand lives. The Shining Path was brutal in its methods, favouring summary...
In 1934, one of the most disturbing aspects of the Red Menace and the creeping influence of Moscow – for the Daily Mail at least – was a public school magazine called Out of Bounds....
Midwinter. Dead of. I own you says my mind. Own what, own whom. I look up....
Don DeLillo’s new novel makes a direct but counterintuitive approach to the destruction of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. It is anti-sentimental: constructed in short...
When Jonathan Lethem was born, in 1964, his mother had dropped out of college and was piercing ears with a pin and ice-cube in Greenwich Village, where she ran with a crowd of folksingers...
When A.E. Housman failed his final examinations at Oxford he went to London to work as a clerk in the Patent Office. After ten years of that, he was appointed, at the age of 33, to the chair of...