‘Dante in English’ is an anthology of English translations of passages from Dante (most of them from the Commedia); it also includes poetry in English by authors who have been...
(i) CASSANDRA: My lips rush the night, skull empty- ing, wide, cold, yolks gone, was it for this? is like the moment when is like the when is like the CHORUS: you amaze me CASSANDRA: Apollo!...
Adam Thorpe’s first novel, Ulverton (1992), was set in a fictional downland village, and traced its history from 17th-century isolation to M4 dormitory town. Thorpe told the story of this...
Gamal Abdul Nasser was inspired in his youth by ‘Awdat al-ruh (literally ‘Return of the Spirit’), a novel by one of the grand figures in Egyptian literature, Tawfiq al-Hakim...
Lev or Leo Nussimbaum (aka Essad Bey, aka Kurban Said) was born in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, in 1905. As a young man he claimed to be the son of an immensely wealthy Persian-Turkic prince....
In April 1959 Frank O’Connor wrote to his editor at the New Yorker to say that he had taken ‘the family up to Sligo to see how Yeats was getting on’. Since Yeats had been dead...
On 11 November 2001, the New York Times announced a major literary discovery. Henry Louis Gates, chairman of the African-American Studies Department at Harvard, had bought at auction the...
When I was twenty years old, on days that were darker and brighter than now, I got up at six and swam fifty lengths every morning, steady and even, though not as precise, or as sure as the one...
Ten years ago, Marlene van Niekerk published a novel that broke radically with the tradition of Afrikaans writing. Triomf, a grotesque family drama set in a poor white Afrikaner community, part...
The blurb on this excellent new and expanded edition of Edward Thomas’s Collected Poems tells you that Thomas was ‘one of the great English poets of the 20th century’, which is...
I know what it is to be powerless I know what it is to be made to lie low while the unknown enemy invades you what it is not to have words for what is happening for grass and tree and inanimate...
‘Just as the pearl is the oyster’s affliction,’ Flaubert wrote in a letter in 1852, ‘so style is perhaps the discharge from a deeper wound.’ It is an arresting...
What’s the most frequent question writers get asked? ‘Do you use a pen or do you type?’ Readers read; writers write, right? Well no.
My new computer not only points out in red misspelled words it highlights in green ungrammatical sentences. Everything I write is Greened. I’d check it out but I’d find out what it is I do Wrong and...
How suddenly the private is revealed in a bombed-out city, how the blue and white striped wallpaper of a second-storey bedroom is now exposed to the lightly falling snow as if the room had...
Caravaggio raises Lazarus on the Messina canvas in Room Four, where they squiny at the light that comes across from behind Christ. Maybe they think it is a snap of sun, outside the cave, in...
Louise Glück, the poet laureate of the United States for 2003-2004, belongs to the line of American poets who value fierce lyric compression. This tradition was established by Emily...
There wasn’t anyone to thank. Two hours from Paris in a field. The car was burning in a ditch. Of course, the young star of the movie can’t be killed off so early. He felt he had to...