Red-eyed and flinching, Flavius was applying a depilatory paste of ivy gum and crushed centipede to little effect. The sudden silence meant they were waiting for that smooth-cheeked decemvir to...
Introduction Hugo Williams sits looking somewhat cowed and apprehensive in the tea rooms of the Waldorf Hotel. His appearance, dark, formal suit and tie, silk handkerchief arranged for show in...
Can you always count on a bastard for a fancy prose style? It is hard to imagine the fiction of Edward St Aubyn stripped of the cool silver of its style. I am not accusing St Aubyn of being a...
The Emperor’s Children is an expansive novel, with multiple plots recounted from multiple perspectives, but it circles around three friends who met more than a decade before at Brown. Like...
I A white finger of frost along the spine Of the country, and the first rumours of the first Female Archbishop of Canterbury: while still In her cradle the Lord filled Her to the brim, and drove...
Jonathan Raban’s first work of fiction, Foreign Land, was published in 1985; his second, Waxwings, in 2003; Surveillance is his third. A gap of almost twenty years, and then two novels in fairly...
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2004), was ostensibly a coming of age story. A teenage girl is abused by her repressive Catholic father and, following a political...
Literary biography is one of the background noises of our age. It’s a decent, friendly sort of hum, like the Sunday papers or chatter on a train. It gives the punters a bit of history and a...
Writing in the New Yorker in April 1986, Calvin Trillin told the story of Susie Guillory, a native of Louisiana who, when applying for a passport, discovered that she was African American....
In an area of dairy pasture a few miles from Coventry, there is a bench formed from one half of a large clinker-built rowing boat sticking vertically out of the ground, with a sturdy wooden seat...
In The Inheritance of Loss, her second novel, Kiran Desai addresses herself to an Indian culture in which globalisation isn’t imagined but experienced, whether in exile abroad or as a...
Traveller’s Tales: Chapter 13 The bicycle paths of this Social Democracy are busy with pedallers, humourless and good, speeding down their privileged corridors, kinetic emblems of an...
VocationsRosary, pillar, garden, assumption, solitude:the five Marías you and your sisters make,distinguished by the vocations of the Virgin.Amongst you all resemblance hidesin posture,...
I watched The Godfather for the first time with my little brother. I’d been worried he was too young for it, but that was before we got to the notorious scene in which the camera starts out...
What would the 18th-century poetic canon look like if women were included? Imagine women poets being venerated alongside Alexander Pope, who held that ‘Most Women have no Characters at...
As anyone who has directed a remake of King Kong knows, revisiting classics is a perilous business. However much you claim to stand on the shoulders of the mighty beast, you still risk ending up,...
Hart Crane, for one, was in no doubt about it. ‘He’s the prime ram of our flock,’ he insisted to Allen Tate in the summer of 1922. Tate was initially puzzled by the phrase, as...
In our just deserts it’s hard to do a well, Assay the soil, dig, drill, and lay it down; That’s why the villain loves the villanelle. The enamoured self is soft and needs a shell...