Old vendettas, and no details of them, or whose heads were on the spikes. I don’t want to go down this sad, steep street, sidestepping vendors of handbags and leather belts, only to be...
The first reports of a gruesome disaster reached Paris on 5 September 1816. A French frigate, the Medusa, had run aground on the notorious and poorly mapped Arguin Bank off the coast of West...
One of the great pleasures of reading Tony Harrison is the sense of quick passage between worlds, the sudden switch from the local to the international and back. At one moment he immerses us in a...
Alun Lewis is usually remembered as a war poet or, more precisely, as a soldier poet. ‘All Day It Has Rained’ is familiar to those who know nothing else about its author and to some...
How many Hamlets would you like? A play of that name was performed in the late 1580s. It was probably bloody and Senecan, and probably written by Thomas Kyd. Another one (probably...
Farewell My Lovely A really good detective never gets married. Raymond Chandler I’d gotten used to that roomy grin, the face like a bag of facts, the flank round as a pony’s, and the...
For the past three decades, Mikhail Bakhtin has been more of an industry than an individual. Not only an industry, in fact, but a flourishing transnational corporation, complete with jet-setting...
Nearly 25 years ago, when Valentino Achak Deng was six years old, his village in Southern Sudan was razed by the murahaleen, paramilitaries working for the government in Khartoum to suppress the...
You’d figure the hawk for an isolate thing, commanding the empyrean, taking his ease in the thermals and wind until that retinal flick, the plunge and shriek – cruelly perfect at what...
At the end of David Dabydeen’s poem ‘Coolie Odyssey’ (1988), the poet, deracinated by education, distance and time from the dirt-poor ancestors he is elegising, considers his...
These days, God-like authorial omniscience is permitted only if God is a sweet ghost, the kind with whom the residents can peaceably coexist. This is especially true in most contemporary short...
One day: stronger wind than anyone expected. Stronger than ever before in the recording...
America O America, I feel like Superman going weak from proximity to Kryptonite Something has spread a small Donatello of urine Over the tessellated floor of the execution chamber...
The first piece of verse by Rudyard Kipling I committed to memory – without even knowing I was doing so – was incised in large Roman capitals on a wall of the Honoured Dead Memorial...
The Italian writer, chemist and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi died twenty years ago, on 11 April 1987, when he plummeted down the stairwell of his apartment building in Turin. He was 67. The...
Literary tourism is naff. It means coach parties, blue plaques, monuments, the National Trust, Friends of this and that. It buys from Oxfam books like The Brontë Country, Dickens’s...
So what would you do if you’d just killed a rich man’s housekeeper, when the bomb you set for her employer went off while she was still in the house? You might run, as Mary does, to a...
Why do politicians write books? Sometimes money is the simple answer. Disraeli and Churchill were both scribbling before they entered Parliament, and Churchill ended with more than one small...