The world of Kate Atkinson’s novels is distinctive. This isn’t because it’s confined to a particular place (Behind the Scenes at the Museum, 1995, her first novel, was set in...
Here’s a question: who do you suppose wrote the following pitiful scene? A restless, sad, longing little heart was beating under a worn calico dress, in a little room in Fourth Street....
Over the mountain they vacillate. Not quite flies over dung – the mountain is too good for that. And flies land – these hover, and resist landing as long as possible. They need the...
Friedrich Hölderlin was rescued from oblivion by a young German scholar called Norbert von Hellingrath, who wrote a dissertation on Hölderlin’s translations of Pindar and began...
I have a dream I wake from, now and then, mostly in summer, the swallows etching my walls with shadow, eider drowsing on the firth, the gold light in the street trees thick with gnats: surprised,...
‘Hamlet’ is perhaps the most popular literary work ever put down on paper. This does not necessarily make it any easier to see clearly, or to come to terms with intellectually. This...
Crookback, I sit at the great bay window swinging a pig’s bladder from a stick – a severed head condemned to lightness. I’m muddled, addled, a mad egg. Pick, peck, pick –...
Anyone who has read Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (1994) will be disconcerted by the first nine or so chapters of Birds without Wings: the adjectives have withered. On the opening page,...
Ilya Ehrenburg had a complaint about his friend Pablo Neruda’s work. ‘Too much root,’ he said. ‘Too many roots in your poems. Why so many?’ Neruda, reporting this...
Last year I went to the South Bank to hear Toni Morrison read from this novel. The event was sold out many weeks in advance. I got there early and watched the place fill up with middle-aged white...
after the Gaelic of the ‘Carmina Gadelica’ Monday at 6 a.m. I heard a lamb, And then, while I sat by, A snipe’s kid-cry. I saw the cuckoo, grey as slate Before I ate. On...
They were both eight-year-old grammar-school boys when news began to reach England of the bloody events of St Bartholomew’s Day, 1572 (news which bolstered moves towards Protestant reform...
Tom Raworth, according to Marjorie Perloff, is the ‘oldest living open-heart surgery survivor, treated in the UK in the first round of heart operations conducted there in the 1950s’....
No one overwrites quite like Patrick McGrath. In a crowded field, he must be British fiction’s most prodigious overwriter. He made his name writing intense, florid novels about ‘wild...
This bird used to be the most numerous on earth And to blot out the sun for hours over Wisconsin and Michigan And to strip bare the great forests of cranberries, pine-nuts, and acorns. Whole...
B.S. Johnson died by his own hand in 1973. He was 40, and the author of seven novels, all of them rather odd in ways that put publishers off because their oddities made them expensive to produce...
Before Mark Costello became a writer he was a federal prosecutor. His first book, Bag Men (1997), was set in 1960s Boston. A priest is murdered on the runway at Logan. A new ultra-pure drug is...
Both in art and in our general ideas about the passage of human life there is assumed to be a general abiding timeliness. We assume that the essential health of a human life has a great deal to...