Giving offence has become an unfashionable sport, but Kingsley Amis belongs in its hall of fame, one of the all-time greats. When Roger Micheldene, the central character in his 1963 novel, One...
John Skelton should be one of the great figures of English poetry. He is widely regarded as the most significant poet in the 130 years between the death of Chaucer and the flourishing of Thomas...
Kathy Acker wrote 13 novels and published one collection of essays before her death from cancer, aged 53, in 1997. Born in New York, she began writing when she returned there in the early 1970s...
Alan Furst’s much-admired thrillers are set in Continental Europe during the Second World War and the years leading up to it. His heroes are more likely to be journalists, film producers or...
Murasaki – I imagined a dye the colour of mulberries. A burnet moth’s underwing. She brushes past Sei Shonagon. Sleeves in tension. Both brushes charged with silken resistance. When...
From the interior night of the unconscionably tall, arched doorway, the shadows commence a faint unnerving undulation; they wear an awful sheen, as if the shade has been interminably brushed...
It takes me so long to read the ’paper, said to me one day a novelist hot as a firecracker, because I have to identify myself with everyone in it, including the corpses, pal. John...
Drombeg County Cork Between the portals and the axials lay the central slab with its flotsam of euro-cents and hair-bangs, wet-scarred words, a Ryanair boarding pass kept from flight by a pebble....
This man, this other Whom brilliance of sunlight almost drowns – He is a dark blur Out on the beach inspecting stones. So does he come Foolish like this each day to stare Drawn to an edge...
Donald Justice, who died in August 2004 at the age of 78, was one of the most subtle and enchanting American poets of his generation. In ‘Variations on a text by Vallejo’, a poem...
Shatila is a short car journey out of Beirut and a few minutes on foot down a street full of market stalls. You pass a refuse heap where goats browse and small children smash up polystyrene...
Near Luton Airport Its crest should bear a drinker kneeling, weeping in an hourglass: The Wigmore Arms is not convivial; its smeary panes admit October sun. On the wall, a picture of a tree whose...
So irregular, appealing and – if one may say – so pitiable a figure is the Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956) that he comfortably resists summary description. Even his biographer,...
The New Office Tower They tore down the seedy block Of small, poorly-lit shops With their dusty displays Of love bracelets, nose rings, Tarot cards and sticks of incense Where years ago I saw a...
Both of M.J. Hyland’s novels – only two so far – are written from the perspective of weird adolescents. Both books are strong, awkward and unobvious in ways that get under your...
In the early 20th century, literary pilgrims to Stratford-upon-Avon already knew a lot about the great writer they had come to honour. The author’s house in Church St has rather come down...
This ladder creaks. Take that ring off I bought for you in Gdansk, first token of my growing love, with the 40-million-year-old fly embalmed in its amber, resin oozed before Man, not to bruise...
Like many others of his time, Kafka called Yiddish ‘jargon’. This was one of various names for the language, and Kafka, who knew several, could have used another had he so wished. But...