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...
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...