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...
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...