Not that bloodlines – family or otherwise – have ever meant much to me, but at forty one wants forebears almost as much as heirs, and even though the oblivion we’re headed for...
Rosehips or Hagebutten As I grew up calling themHaggard buttons they sound like Though in fact appear brighter Altogether more cherubic Tough in the cheek like a forced smile Hanging on till it...
‘I can’t imagine anything more quaint than a scatological retelling of some nursery tale, or a fiction about a writer writing the fiction you are reading,’ Tobias Wolff...
Norman Rush’s first novel, Mating (1991), is narrated by an unnamed 32-year-old female doctoral student in nutritional anthropology. It takes the cherished theme of a brilliant and...
On the Steps of the National Gallery I am on my way in to destroy Poussin’s Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake. I know what I am doing, believe me. When it has ceased to be part of our...
Returning to her aunt’s villa in Florence in 1899, after an intense but short-lived affair with Axel Munthe, Ottoline Morrell was an ideal candidate to become one of the acolytes who...
Matthew 19-22 This is as good as it gets: this cold fog over the water, this pale companion to the dreams I can’t forget and never quite recall. Stale afternoon. My neighbour stands in her...
With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful...
Some time around the ninth century, Sappho’s nine books were irrecoverably lost. We have some tantalising scraps, single lines and short quotations, but only one complete poem – the...
The care for time in The Winter’s Tale, that is, is not precisely or primarily a matter of ‘seasons’, or of what the undeveloped Imogen, like her husband, defines as the belief that ‘seasons comfort’....
At first Dickens tried to deny that Harold Skimpole, the parasitical aesthete of Bleak House, had been based on his friend Leigh Hunt; but later he confessed, not a little proudly, that the...
Helen says heaven, for her, would be complete immersion in physical process, without self-consciousness – to be the respiration of the grass, or ionised agitation just above the break of a...
We have seen this pebble before Though three feet under. From year To year it changes position. The sea dwindles its contours But not to my brief eye In a mere decade of watching. Stone keeps its...
‘I hate voyages and explorers,’ Lévi-Strauss writes in his Tristes Tropiques (1955). So what is he doing, he asks himself, in producing this account of his expeditions? Must I...
John Franklin (1786-1847) was the most famous vanisher of the Victorian era. He joined the Navy as a midshipman at the age of 14, and fought in the battles of Copenhagen and Trafalgar. When peace...
i.m. Charles Causley Between the Tamar and the tarmac, Beneath a tangled sky, I saw the Cornish poet Walking by. He went where wind and water Will not be overthrown, Where light and water meet...
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter, then briny, then surely burn your tongue. It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn from the cold...
Beckett’s Theory of Tragedy Hegel on sacrifice. The animal dies. The man becomes alert. What do we learn we learn to notice everything now. We learn to say he is a hero let him do it. O is...