Men We often elude the scimitars of the zouaves among the furniture by being geese. Or deodars so that striking at us you also hit your sacred tree. (Ha ha, say we. You say, Just you wait.)...
The first of these books is the product of an interdisciplinary conference at which literary critics and historians exchanged perspectives on a year conspicuous both for political conflict and...
Above the entrance to the saloon bar there is a picture of Shakespeare on the swinging sign. It is the same picture of Shakespeare that I remember from my schooldays, when I frowned over Timon of...
It was a closed space. From the moment I saw it I knew I could depend on it. To hell with the endless weathers Passing above, and the high apartments Shadowing it. Down here On the stone bench,...
Realism is one of the most elusive of artistic terms. ‘Unrealistic’, for example, is not necessarily the same as ‘non-realist’. You can have a work of art which is...
The task of keeping us interested in the canonical poets seems now to have fallen mainly to the Longman Annotated English Poets series. But who are we? Every time another volume is added somebody...
Everyone who reads Paul Muldoon will be dazzled by his linguistic exuberance. He follows the lead of Pope and Byron, engaging in many of the displays of wit that they engage in, particularly an...
In the summer of 1797, William Godwin set out on a tour of the Midlands. He had hoped to visit, among others, Erasmus Darwin, but finding the naturalist away from home, Godwin asked...
There may be many readers who, on hearing of J.M. Coetzee’s Nobel Prize, immediately thought about the cost of clarity. There is so much, after all, missing from Coetzee’s...
When my grandmother found out my mother was going to marry my father, she asked my mother to reconsider. ‘What about David?’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t you like to marry David...
Arthur Rimbaud, the boy who gave it all up for something different, is a legend, both as a poet and a renouncer of poetry. He had finished with literature before the age of 21. By the time his...
I once spent, not very happily, slightly less than 24 hours in Botswana. It was during the summer between my first and second years at university. A friend and I had got hold of some bargain...
Epistle VIII It’s simply untrue, Maecenas, that I do not care for nature. A vile canard: I do, but not unadorned. I need architecture, streets, and, not least, the human form, to frame,...
In ‘How to Become a Publicist’, the liveliest story in Jessica Francis Kane’s first collection, Bending Heaven, a young woman moves to Manhattan to pursue a career in...
Brick Lane used to be the home of the dead. For centuries it was part of a Roman burial ground, an unclean extremity lying beyond the walls of the City of London. In 1603, a quarter of a century...
Sand Water muscling to shore at twilight, Muscling over her ribs, the water so warm For September. Thomas Paine said, We just couldn’t stay boys (regarding the colonists) Or something to...
Elizabeth Stoddard had a healthy interest in comestibles: hot buttered biscuits, salt pork, clams, cream toast, stewed lobster, grilled swordfish and fried tomatoes. No matter how overwhelming her characters’...
A Greek queen commanding a Persian naval squadron is only slightly more improbable than a 17th-century Italian woman becoming a much sought after professional painter of large narrative compositions with...