I went to see McCarthy with cardinals rattling in the boxwood and pecans suffering their convoluted slumber in the heat, taproots humming deep underground; from a parched, bare plain of yellow...
Funeral Marches I hear in me the funeral voices call out transcendentally, when in German style the bands go beating by. At a mad shiver of my vertebrae if I sob like a lost man, it’s that...
On 9 March 1951, Seepersad Naipaul wrote from Trinidad to his son Vidia, who was an undergraduate at Oxford: ‘I am beginning to believe I could have been a writer.’ A month later,...
Edward Said’s Orientalism, published in 1978, gave intellectuals and writers from once colonised nations (themselves often migrants, like Said) a language that liberated and shackled in...
after the Latin of George Buchanan (1506-82) Diogio de Murca, Head and King, Rector of Coimbra University, We all admire the way you’ve got ahead, But your Sub-King Co-ordinator of...
In a 1979 review of Roy Fisher’s collection of poems The Thing about Joe Sullivan, probably the most likeable collection by a not always likeable poet, John Ash wrote: ‘In a better...
Whether or not it will actually happen, it seems clear that America is planning its next global intervention on behalf of the new century to be in Iran. As with Iraq, the ostensible motive or...
Weegee, aka Arthur or Usher Fellig, invented a certain kind of photography. His pictures of New York street life – crime scenes, car wrecks, society girls, circus freaks, racegoers, rough...
How it was, after the babies, One week’s vacation at the shore During late July, trying to isolate A hummock of time in which to be dazed, Beer in the mug, the slant of sunsets, Fried...
How will interacting with relational artefacts affect people’s way of thinking about what, if anything, makes people special? The sight of children and the elderly exchanging tendernesses with robotic...
Prelude Walls climb the ivy And Khartoum, poised on its unamputated foot Singing Will the Nile ever escape into sleep? We were the most loving of lovers, children trickling from us – What...
It’s a rare feeling to be swept up by a book in the childhood way, but when it happens it’s extraordinary: deeply familiar and strangely unsettling. I was staying in a large house in...
In Henry James and the Art of Dress (2001), Clair Hughes gave us a beautifully judged view of James’s delicate way with garments. She showed that he was capable of conveying the effect of...
Christine Brooke-Rose, being in her eighties and suffering many intractable illnesses and disabilities, recognises that her life must be near its end. Since her retirement from the University of...
It’s curfew, and I do my turn around the valley, settling down outposts of mine, the little, far- flung castles, Roche this and Rocca that. And ‘Check,’ I say, and...
Alice Oswald, though she may not seem it at first, is an opinionated poet of ideas, and her poetry is ambitious in both form and scope. She writes taut poems about nature but refuses to call them...
The London Book Fair’s relocation from Olympia to Docklands this year was not unanimously well received. Before it opened, a prominent group of writers protested against the book...
Summertime, like the cinemas, I shut up shop. Thought flies off elsewhere and evaporates. Billboards write white, the air’s warm, the table weighted with fruit. * The moonlight is a work of...