The flight attendant said: We have a mechanical problem with the plane, and we have contacted the FAA for advice, and then: We will be making an emergency landing in Detroit, and then: We will be...
For Eileen It meant you had to be from somewhere else To get a drink. But that was all right for us; We always were, whether travelling west Or east. The trouble came when, dozing On the boat,...
There is a beguiling poem by Raymond Carver which, like many modern poems, though more cheerfully than some, spends most of its short life mulling over the conditions of its own possibility....
In Italy you can buy poetry T-shirts featuring lines by Dante, Leopardi and others. The Ungaretti shirt is good value: it gives you a whole work, though not a very long one. ‘Mattina’...
In 1986, a postal employee in Edmond, Oklahoma ran amok with a gun, shooting 14 co-workers dead and wounding six others before killing himself. Nearly twenty similar incidents occurred at...
In urgent need of an antidote to Paul Burrell’s memoir (see Short Cuts, 20 November), I hurried down to the London Review Bookshop to pick up a copy of Henry Green’s Loving....
The Love Interest We could see it coming from forever, then it was simply here, parallel to that day’s walking. By then it was we who had disappeared, into the tunnel of a book. Rising late...
Like a Member of Parliament, I must declare an interest: I am employed by the publisher of both the OED and Simon Winchester’s account of its genesis. However, I have had no involvement...
It is necessary to study precisely how permanent collective wills are formed, and how such wills set themselves concrete short and long-term ends – i.e. a line of collective action.
When Robinson Crusoe tries to convey what it felt like to be the sole survivor of a shipwreck, he finds himself at almost as much of a loss now, in the telling, as he was then, gloomily pacing...
When asked what I was planning to do on a brief trip to Buenos Aires, my first visit, I said I was going to take the Borges tour. I thought I was joking but soon learned that in Argentina it...
There used to be something thought of as ‘a Booker novel’ – a big, ambitious balloon sent up to signify seriousness and loftiness of purpose. Such books were not always very...
Henning Mankell’s recent series of police procedurals set in the southern Swedish town of Ystad, with Inspector Kurt Wallander as their hero, is a perfect illustration of the fate of the...
For a brief time, a few years ago, I was employed as a temp at the Public Trust Office, one of the grey government monoliths that no one notices in Central London. What this office does, I never...
A scene from a concert: on stage, a young Jewish-American folk singer/ songwriter, accompanied only by his own guitar and the harmonica around his neck, with a forceful, nasal voice and...
When the hero of Jonathan Raban’s new novel is scolded for living in a world of his ‘own construction’, the implied rebuke falls flat: this, for Raban, is the whole point of...
The trailer for the recent BBC dramatisation of Byron’s life made no bones about the poet’s appeal. ‘Everything you’ve ever heard about him is true,’ the husky...
Voices There is the mordant voice from the back alleys of Paris, Villon with Diogenes in his eye, and Robin Starveling, the tailor (he goes with my proletarian bent) and Tom Snout, the tinker (he...