In 1865, a year after John Clare’s death in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, Frederick Martin, a former amanuensis of Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the...
meet me where the sun goes down meet me in the cave, under the battleground meet me on the broken branch meet me in the shade, below the avalanche meet me under the witch’s spell meet me...
In his memoir, Burning the Days (1997), James Salter tells a story about an encounter between William Faulkner and an officer from the local airbase in Greenville, Mississippi in the early 1950s....
One of the most tenacious of all academic myths is that literary theorists don’t go in for close reading. Whereas non-theoretical critics are faithful to the words on the page, theorists...
On the Hiryu, Hajime Toyoshima Starred in the group photos like Andy Hardy, He was so small and cute. His face, as friendly as his first name (In Japanese you say hajime at first meeting), Could...
‘This is a work of fiction. All characters and events are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.’...
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...