According to E.P. Thompson, The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Rights of Man are the two ‘foundation texts’ of the English working-class movement. It is above all in John Bunyan, he...
The public bus into Santo Domingo, sheer Delight, rocking chaos of stops and starts, And a Dominican woman, thin, potentially Attractive, sits on an impromptu jump seat Facing the passengers, her...
Chekhov may be divine, but he is responsible for much sinning on earth. The contemporary short story is essentially sub-Chekhovian. It is most obviously indebted to what Shklovsky called...
In George Peele’s Elizabethan play The Old Wives’ Tale, a character called Jack interrogates the ‘wandering knight’ Eumenides: ‘Are you not the man, sir (deny it if...
When Thackeray died in 1863 his eldest daughter, Anny, who was 26, was left not just with a famous name and a sum of money but with an established place in London literary life. Affectionate and...
Ireland has less of a tradition of literary realism than England, though for an English critic to say so may require a degree of diplomacy. It may sound like saying that Ireland is deficient in...
One of the most eloquent denunciations of plagiarism is delivered by Tristram Shandy. ‘Shall we forever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel...
Across Brooklyn This is the street where they still make coffins: the little workshops, side by side. I pass them with my daughter on our walk to the river. Are we seeking the bridge itself, or...
Novelists are a bunch of lazy good-for-nothings, obviously. It’s a necessary part of the job, that languid repose; that successful weakening of the usual human determination to do something...
All José Saramago’s novels tell a story. Each is predicated on a suggestive and compelling hypothesis: what would happen if the Iberian peninsula were to become detached from the...
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...