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...
James Meek’s early fiction is alert, acrid and funny, and only slightly too insistent on its own quirkiness – as if it were hoping reviewers would call it surreal (they did) and...
a cop came to see me but I didn’t know he was a cop I’m so trusting!! and I said sit down and have a cup of tea and he sat down and had a cup of tea and he was a young man a nice...
For Eddie Linden at Seventy I’m thinking of the pope and you, Eddie, As I dander towards the New York Public Library to peek at the field notebooks Of Edward Thomas wandering in England In...
There is whiskey but no cocoa, Guinness but no tea; or only a sort of bitter dust which, when brewed, does nothing to pep up the mornings. Fog enshrouds bicycles in Merrion Square, a squally rain...
He is not sleeping, though you might think so. His eyes are half shut against the light. ‘An old man’s nap.’ They smile, walk softly on. He is smiling too, but mentally. Without...
I am old enough to remember the Maigret series on television, with Rupert Davies in the starring role. To the accompaniment of a mildly haunting theme tune, a portly figure would appear onscreen,...
Abdulrazak Gurnah left Zanzibar a few years after the violent revolution of 1964, when the constitutional sultanate installed by the departing British was overthrown. It was a time, in...
In the years since their publication in 1948, Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos have given rise to interpretative bad faith on a scale unusual even by the lofty standards of literary criticism. The...
Parallel Texts Under each leaflet of a bracken frond The spores are as neatly herring-boned As filaments in a moth’s antenna Or vanes on a pigeon’s quill. I wrote these images on a...
after the Latin ‘Franciscanus’ of George Buchanan (1506-82) A barren haugh. No flowers, no trees for miles. No use for harvest. Barbed-wire thistles spatter Dour, poisoned fields....
Report from a Spa I haven’t tried the water yet, that can wait. But the redecorated station implies future, which makes me mulish. Corpuscle count and forest ozone, suspicion of the spa...
John Carey, former Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, an authority on Milton and Donne and Dickens and others, the very model of a Merton Professor, has also been, for decades, the...