When in doubt, toss a coin. If you really can’t decide which alternative is preferable, if everything seems equal and you don’t care a damn, it can’t matter what you settle on....
For the past half-century Muriel Spark has been the recognised master of detachment. The closer she approaches matters of terror or outrage or betrayal or shame the more controlled her voice. To...
The best wood to make chips with for our fire was from bakehouse boxes Dad brought smeared with lard. It had a whiplash crack. Its sparks leaped higher. You had to look sharpish with the...
For twenty years, since I first read the first poem, ‘To Go to Lvov’, in his first English-language book, Tremor (1985), I have had a happily unexamined admiration for the work of the...
Straightforwardly enough, The Door begins with a door. In fact, it begins with ‘The Door’, a three-page prologue – a door into the novel – in which a woman recounts a bad...
Manifest Try to reconstruct me from the heraldry of the flesh, the thick blur of scar tissue, shreds of clothing, that burst vessel in the eye like a twist in a marble, those frost-feather...
Orange The heaven of childhood had something to do with citrus: back in the coal towns, deep in a season of rain, or out on the farm roads, away from the dangerous world, where children came down...
Bret Easton Ellis has always been interested in the ways in which people don’t pay attention, and in the cost of attention when it is paid. In the comédie humaine he has been writing...
If you try to find out about the legacy of Ayn Rand, your search engine will probably direct you first to aynrand.org, a website run by the Ayn Rand Institute in California. The ARI was founded...
Restorations Inside, they were polishing the floor: Planks pried from a sunken schooner Dried out, worm holes intact – so that If you spilled your drink, some of it Could possibly drip into...
Lytton Strachey loved reading letters, including the published kind, but after glancing at a few sentences of George Meredith’s correspondence in 1912, he felt ‘so nauseated’,...
[ZEUS PAUSES AMID WRITING HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY] How everyone thinks him a happy-go-lucky guy. True and not true, don’t give the ending away. Rhyme angst with spanks? Bit of a buzz on the old...
Edmund Wilson has become an object of fantasy. A lot of desire is currently invested in him as the representative of a cherished role: the critic-as-generalist, the man of letters as cultural...
after the Latin ‘Adventus in Galliam’ of George Buchanan (1506-82) Badlands of Portugal, bye-bye For ever, starving crofts whose year-round crop Is lack of cash. And you, fair...
Margaret Atwood’s new novel is a reworking of the Odyssey, told largely from Penelope’s point of view. The Penelopiad is presented by its publisher as a retelling of a myth, but it...
‘I am well. How are you? It is wonderful here,’ the first letter in this selection begins, and goes on: ‘I love it here; real mad fun. Especially the evening game of gin rummy...
We tiptoed into the house. The neighbourhood was quiet as a mouse. I felt very on edge. The money was in the oven, not the fridge. * I glanced at the note on the piano. Uh oh, uh oh, uh oh. *...
On my father’s bookshelves, tucked between yet another novel by Somerset Maugham and J.B. Priestley’s account of a journey to Mexico with his archaeologist wife, was a copy of Carry...