In Jamal Mahjoub’s Wings of Dust (1994), a Sudanese exile pauses halfway through his memoir to let his thoughts catch up with his writing: ‘I must set down the pen to prevent the...
Some people won’t read novels. I understand. I’m close to not wanting to read novels myself: they’re trying, and often seem the same. But one thing all fiction guarantees is...
‘A woman threw her glass of wine at me,’ James Lasdun’s second novel begins. At a party held by a wealthy philanthropist in New York, a woman walks up to the narrator and asks:...
Walter Benjamin once remarked that what drove men and women to revolt was not dreams of liberated grandchildren but memories of oppressed ancestors. Visions of future happiness are all very well;...
Peter Green’s splendid new translation of Catullus makes quite a substantial volume: more than three hundred pages in all, with an introduction, parallel text in Latin and English, notes,...
3. Night Recall Station Road: typed in darkness Walwalinj silhouette blown sharp flooded gum overhang a blackly sparkling canker, short...
Bears Pawpaw and Paprika, two great bears of the Egyptians of Lancashire, Chohawniskey Tem, the Witches’ County, who, when our camp plucked its tents and pulled out its maps, walked...
When he published The Ice Storm in 1994, Rick Moody seemed to be looking for a workable compromise between suburban realism and what Gore Vidal once called the ‘Research and...
Early springtime, London, 1944: the Little Blitz period of suddenly redoubled enemy air-raids after the comparative lull that followed the Blitz proper of 1940-41. Two women sit drinking tea on a...
In a famous poem by Hopkins, a child called Margaret is rebuked for grieving over the fall of leaves. Leaves fall; stuff happens; we get over it; or, to stay with Hopkins’s idiom, the heart...
There is an awkward period in the lives of clothes, furniture and writers, when they become something more than dated but something less than a piece of history. We call things that have reached...
This woman, I heard her say she could not bear To bring a child into a world so dreadful It scoops up smoking body parts like that. Did she mean she would rather leave them lying? Of course not,...
For Sam And courage, courage is what is called for to explore the outskirts of the city, where the disinherited abide, and trouble is a form of entertainment, as are bruises and broken glass, in...
Towards the end of Michel Houellebecq’s first novel, Extension du domaine de la lutte (1994), translated into English under the dismal title Whatever (1998), the nameless protagonist falls...
‘A great many novels nowadays are just travel books,’ Ivy Compton-Burnett grumbled to Barbara Pym in 1960. ‘Olivia has just published one about Bulgaria.’ She hadn’t...
1. Off to the left, those islands, named and renamed so many times now everyone’s forgotten their names, are sleeping. Pale rods of light, the morning’s implements, lie in among them...
At the Wallace Collection, Poussin’s A Dance to the Music of Time has been taken down into the basement. It can be found there until 5 February, holding a position of honour in Dancing to...
In his historical novels, E.L. Doctorow has written about ragtime and the Rosenbergs, about mobsters and world fairs. His most recent novel deals with one of the most fraught subjects in US...