All the Cowboys’ Horses I was trying to remember who shouted out ‘Wakey Wakey!’ Was it Arthur Askey? I couldn’t understand how Kay Kendall and Denholm Elliot slipped...
Stepping outside in the dark, if only to fetch the coal, this December night, I stop in a river of wind on the cellar steps and think of men, no different from me, transforming themselves at will...
For my mother at 75 The sun-room, but there’s only drizzly rain Finessing silly doodles on the view Of what would otherwise be summer grass And blameless lupins blazing at the stake. So all...
The epigraph to Drinking Coffee Elsewhere comes from Alex Haley’s Roots: ‘The histories have been written by the winners.’ The implication is that this collection will give us...
In his 1987 autobiography, Arthur Miller tells of a conversation with a Kentucky farmer about the Holy Ghost. Pressed to give a definition of the most mysterious element in the Trinity, the...
In the middle of the Depression, Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA) set out to increase American purchasing power by getting the unemployed back to work. For the most part they...
At the beginning of her short story ‘Jakarta’, Alice Munro describes two young women who choose a spot on a beach because it’s sheltered and because ‘they want to be out...
How can I paint Winter Landscape with Temples and Travellers, or Five-Colour Parakeet on Blossoming Apricot Tree? The oracle boxes are empty and the Minister with a Brief for Charming Explanation...
In David Grossman’s 1998 novel, Be My Knife, an antiquarian book-dealer starts a passionate correspondence with a woman whom he has barely caught sight of across a room. The unlikely...
Publishers keep good records because those that don’t go out of business. Backlists and post-mortem copyright dispose them to be historically minded about their dealings. It was only...
For a long time, Paul Auster’s novels were much more popular in France than in America. Perhaps this is because he sounds more convincing in French. ‘Ecrivain de la mégapole, de...
Robert Stone was born in August 1937, nine months after Don DeLillo and three – we’re told – after Thomas Pynchon. Dog Soldiers, his second novel, made his name in the...
‘It’s, on the whole, I think,’ Henry James wrote to Edmund Gosse, ‘a queer place to plant the standard of duty.’ The letter is dated 7 January 1893, 29 years before...
The philosophical novel is a well-established genre. Comp. Lit. 102: readings in Dostoevsky, Kafka, Mann, Gide, Sartre (and Martin Amis if time permits); little or no philosophical sophistication...
Jhumpa Lahiri’s first book, Interpreter of Maladies (2000), was a collection of spare short stories, whose characters, many of them Indian, exist in a sort of permanent exile, living in...
You might expect a landing light to be bright, a herald of safe arrival, but the light Don Paterson had most in mind when naming his new collection is weaker and less sure. ‘The...
The golden light is white. It is the colour of moonlight in the middle of the night If you suddenly wake and you are a child In the forest and the wild Animals all around you are sleeping. You...
In the Planetarium Never-yet-equalled, wide-screen blockbuster That grew more and more muddled After a spectacular opening shot. The pace, even for the most patient Killingly slow despite the...