The dust-jacket was a late 19th-century invention; the notion that ‘you can’t judge a book by its cover’ must be a good deal older than that. It’s an expression that in an...
Writers do not always know what their best writings are. Daniel Defoe believed his magnum opus to be his huge, passionately political, intermittently philosophical poem in heroic couplets, Jure...
for RC 1. Huron River We walked by the river its arms all gold in winter sun like tin. Workshops of afternoon hummed along elsewhere. We noted ice at the shore and ice on plants and ice from the...
‘We posture as apostles of fair play, as good sportsmen, as professional knights-errant – and throw beer bottles at the umpire when he refuses to cheat for our side,’ H.L....
Superficially, at least, it’s not remotely like Brick Lane. Does that matter? Yes and no. Following her ambitious and pacy first novel about Bangladeshis in the East End of London, Monica...
According to Hannibal Hamlin, in Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (2004), English versions and translations of the Book of Psalms, the original book of Dave – supposedly...
Snow on Cerrillos Road Behind the big stores the desert is hoary. Beneath the snow it will be the colour of night. The trailer homes, shut up, no lights on, bed cold under roofs the somnolent...
Feverish After Yannis Ritsos Small squares on the move, merging, pulling apart, building bricks unbuilding, a city of windows inside a city of windows, everything hanging on two right-angles,...
‘This book will save your life’: it’s a bold claim. In A.M. Homes’s new novel, Richard Novak has systematically removed himself from the world of human relationships. In...
Grandmothers and their caged birds Must be trembling with fear As you climb with heavy steps Stopping at each floor to take a rest. A monkey dressed in baby clothes Who belonged to an opera...
The BBC claims to be looking forward to a newly interactive and demanding audience of ‘participants and partners’ and ‘communities’ and so on; but there is an opposing possibility, a movement to...
The Kill Far-conquering man . . . You’ve written, since you first turned hunter, many a level new death-rule of trap or net. Though I know the strip of sail they hung into the...
for Jackson Lears But it was no longer a casino. You could not even dice for drinks in the bar. Malcolm Lowry I missed the turn-off for the capital ‘c’ Casino and couldn’t...
The Anglo-Saxons had no libraries in the sense that we understand the word: rooms, or better still buildings, dedicated to the storage of books. St Aldhelm of Malmesbury wrote a Latin riddle with...
George Saunders – whose semi-official website carries a reminder that the man who played Addison DeWitt in All about Eve was called George SANDERS – was born in Chicago in 1958. A...
Last year, Louis Knickerbocker, a meat distributor from Newport Beach, California, bought a Picasso drawing from the online service of Costco for $40,000. Knickerbocker thought it a steal:...
The life of François-Marie Arouet, a.k.a. Voltaire (1694-1778), could hardly have been as colourful as that of the eponymous hero of his most famous novella, Candide. In his brief but...
The Sail, Again Only to sleep for a bit and then to wake up – this’d force the pack from off my shoulders draw the pushiness from out my chest and burst the buttons – the...