amor vincit omnia Venus lies ahead – ball of mists and disenchanted fruitfulness, too hot for charity, too steamy for reproach, my mission crystalline as snow: to conquer what has always...
Wormwood A flight of loose stairs off the street into a high succession of empty rooms, prolapsed chairs and a memory of women perfumed with hand-oil and artemisia absinthium: wormwood to me, and...
Ma Jian wrote The Noodle Maker in 1990, four years after he left China for Hong Kong, then still a British colony. When Hong Kong was handed over to China in 1997, he left for Europe, living...
You know you’re getting old when sleeping with a vampire no longer gives you a sickly thrill. At the age of ten or eleven, having absorbed the requisite number of creaky old Bela Lugosi...
Measurement Nine and Seven, one by one, Lay face down on a home-made skateboard, Hauling it forward, inch by rope inch, Into the Tomb of the Eagles. Seven glissaded down Maes Howe’s...
I remember al-Sayyab,* his futile cries across the Gulf: ‘Iraq, Iraq, nothing but Iraq,’ And nothing answers but an echo. I remember al-Sayyab under these same Sumerian skies Where a...
Richard Wollheim’s memoir of his childhood, roughly a third of which appeared in two recent issues of the London Review (15 April and 20 May), is to be published in its entirety in...
Jonathan Lethem’s novels tend to be fusions of genres. As She Climbed across the Table (1997) is a science-fiction campus novel; Girl in Landscape (1998) an SF western. Gun, with Occasional...
I have generally done well in examinations and not been intimidated by them. Back in 1948 when I took my O Levels – or School Certificate as they were then called – I was made fun of...
This engrossing book sets out to claim something for its subject that no other English-language publication has even thought of. I do not believe that any among those of us who have written on...
After stealing a talking parrot on the island of Capri, Jeanette Winterson’s latest narrator is referred to the Tavistock Clinic, where she explains that she was trying to capture some sort...
Took a turn or two across a plot of May, to where he saw wild thyme, some clustered oxlips, bunches of riviniana violets. And, the way Adam put it, their bodies seemed incorporate with their...
after the 14th-century Flemish Form and form-giver, light and light-bearer, mistaken for air, for light by the eye, flies wingless, lighter than what it bears Stored in the eye, makes sight...
For a country with one of the oldest book-making traditions in Europe, Ireland was a late arrival on the magazine scene: Tom Clyde’s first example is Swift’s Examiner, started in...
F.T. (Filippo Tommaso) Marinetti liked to describe himself as the ‘caffeine of Europe’. He was undoubtedly the most daring and inventive artistic propagandist of the 20th century, and...
At the tail-end of 2000, Ian Sansom decided to move from London to a small town in County Down. He had half expected friends to dismiss his plan as a backwoods adventure, and was surprised when...
In Padua, on 20 January 1976, a young girl called Margherita Magello was repeatedly stabbed and left for dead. She was discovered by Massimo Carlotto, a 19-year-old student radical and member of...
Sweetest Little candy in death’s candy shop, I gave your sugar a lick When no one was looking, Took you for a ride on my tongue To all the secret places, Trying to appear above suspicion As...