Hoodwinked by the flat-lining, inside out Silver lining of every absent cloud, A clear day halo, a vulcanised rout Of dust and eucalypt, diesels and loud Stereos hyping up an eager crowd:...
The Layered doubt Empty Laird was called that ‘cause his Christian name was Matthew and his middle one was Thomas. Towards the end he commented that by his-self he’d made a sixth of...
It is best to read Iain Sinclair’s work out of the corner of your eye. The action takes place on the peripheries; it disintegrates if you concentrate too hard on the middle. Dining on...
In April 2001, Harper’s ran a vast essay on the use and abuse of the English language in the United States. Entitled ‘Tense Present: Democracy, English and the Wars over Usage’,...
Sukhdev Sandhu loves a certain vision of London. He finds it realised in the 1987 film Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, scripted by Hanif Kureishi, especially the ‘extraordinary scene’ in...
Poems of science and science fiction, history and politics, love poems, comic poems, social realist or surrealist poems, dialogues and monologues, newspaper poems, Beat poems, concrete poems,...
More Feedback The passionate are immobilised. The case-hardened undulate over walls of the library, in more or less expressive poses. The equinox again, not knowing whether to put the car in...
It was all done with a pastry board and a bulldog clip. Sheets of paper were clipped to the board, the board rested on the arms of his chair and the fountain-pen began to cover the pages with a...
The Also Ran The hare wasn’t there. The hare was nowhere To be seen, a sheen Of kicked-up dust, the hare’s coat, Every hair of the flank of the hare so sleek, so chic, It was...
We could, as a homage to Derrida, go deep with this story of an immigrant, a wealthy man, a publisher and ‘cultural tycoon’ (Quartet Books, Women’s Press, the Literary Review,...
In the Provinces 3 (Bohemia) The silence round a dead mole on the edge of a wheat field is deceptive. Under it is a rendezvous for beetles, armed and in black. Above it wheels a hawk with ruffled...
Here, in six hundred double-column pages, we have what the editor describes as ‘the most comprehensive collection of contemporary reviews of T.S. Eliot’s work as it appeared’....
There’s only one naked lady left, going to ruin out there in the fog amid the dahlias and lavender, its pink trumpet flowers wilted and in tatters. There used to be a couple of dozen of...
People have been asking for books to help them since the invention of printing. Before printing, actually, in the days of scrolls and tablets: what is the Bible if not a self-help manual? William...
‘Willie Chandran asked his father one day: "Why is my middle name Somerset?”’ So begins Half a Life, the strange and chilling novel that V.S. Naipaul published in 2001 –...
‘Because what’s history?’ a character asks rhetorically in Philip Roth’s astonishing new novel. ‘History is everything that happens everywhere. Even here in Newark....
Comedy is the disguised priest who weds every couple, the German writer Jean Paul Richter said, and in the English novel the greatest of all disguised priests, the comic celebrant of happy...
‘I’m one of those writers who likes to stay with what he knows,’ James Gillespie, the persistently apolitical hero of Ronan Bennett’s third novel, The Catastrophist...