The Welsh girl’s name is Esther Evans. She is 17 years old, and lives with her father – her mother is dead – on a sheep farm in North Wales. In the evenings she works behind the...
I When the wind collapses at last the sand glitters with oil like the fine mist of blood a dying man would breathe onto his friend’s face and shirt. It’s this freak weather. For five...
‘I am convinced,’ wrote Henry Church to the poet who had just dedicated to him his longest poem, ‘Notes toward a Supreme Fiction’, ‘that Mrs Stevens has had an...
‘You know the left think that I am conservative,’ Hannah Arendt once said, ‘and the conservatives think I am left or I am a maverick or God knows what. And I must say that I...
In a glass case in the garret of a house just off Fleet Street, a historic publishing contract has just gone on display.* It only takes up one piece of paper, rather smaller than a sheet of A4,...
E.M. Forster wrote a surprising amount of criticism of one kind or another, but he believed that criticism was of almost no use to art or to artists. He certainly regarded himself as an artist,...
The Immigration Form Are you now or have you ever been skilled with silkworm gut or boric lint? How intimate are you with breathing through a Carbolic Chinese Twist? Using the four-hand lift or...
Last October, on the evening of Eid-ul-Fitr, hundreds of men gathered outside a cinema in downtown Cairo. When they discovered the film was sold out, they began ripping down posters and wrecking...
Once again, I find myself on the North Pole. I have no sled, no dogs and I’m dressed for bed. You ask me if I’m cold? Of course I’m cold, you idiots. Sleepwalkers unite....
A decade ago, I went to lunch with Gore Vidal at his house in Ravello. That house (since abandoned) and that sort of occasion have been written about so often by Vidal’s guests and...
You Said You Would Write Two strong coffees and an hour of unfocused staring, and now the hour rolls round to put on some clothes and then to take them off again and return to bed. Later, it will...
A woman lies in bed next to her husband, unable to sleep: tomorrow they must tell their children a secret, something ‘that will change all our lives’. What is it? For most of the...
Galaxidi Those golden hairs I’m stroking on your thigh I only get to glimpse in this Greek light and only here do claw-snags on my hand, (from grappling with our lunch of garavides, the...
‘A creative artist has to be painfully honest with himself,’ R.S. Thomas declared in his autobiography, Neb: He has to look as objectively as possible at his creations. What is the...
The penis, in the contemporary novel, has been a mighty matter, looming large. Who will forget the narrator of The Bell Jar seeing an adult penis for the first time and being both fascinated and...
He could dig no deeper than a grave, six feet perhaps of fractured soil, before the battering instrument began to turn upon itself. [It] sought to bury its body in the reluctant ground...
We can drop this building into a biscuit tin, all forty storeys, everything’s planned, down to the last inch; the pre-repairs, the pattern of charges: nitroglycerine, dynamite, RDX. We...
There is a peculiar intensity about some streets in Dublin which becomes more gnarled and layered the longer you live in the city and the greater the stray memories and associations you build up....