For Lucas Morning; the usual walk to the harbour: the tide half-out the fat mud fretted with bird-prints light slurred with oil and slicked reflections ice white or coffee brown strawberry red or...
He was the son of a servant of the Crown from a well-heeled South of England background, who shone at prep school but proved something of an academic flop later on. A passionate left-wing...
M’introduire dans ton histoire C’est en héros effarouché . . . (Mallarmé) Her river was the swift-flowing Rhone; mine, all that improbable year, the Hérault...
Towards the end of this, Ardashir Vakil’s second novel, a successful Anglo-Indian novelist is quizzed by a group of friends in a North London kitchen about the way he writes, and about the...
In Siri Hustvedt’s first novel, The Blindfold, a young woman is hospitalised by the combined forces of an unhappy love affair, an artist’s photograph of her, and her translation of an...
The size and variety of Victor Hugo’s oeuvre – around 200,000 lines of verse, plus dozens of novels, plays and critical works – makes it difficult to get an overview, let alone...
Sanctuary Stay awhile. Don’t go just yet. The sirens are roaming the streets, the stabbing youths are out in packs, there’s mayhem in the tea leaves. You’re much better off...
In his afterword, Len Rix, the translator of this Hungarian novel, says that its narrative ‘coincides with rising Fascism at home and abroad, and probes the national obsession with...
Well, I’ll start with where born which is no doubt where I’ll end – a section of low land on the Rock River where it empties into Lake Koshkonong, all near Fort Atkinson,...
after Ovid for James Lasdun The midday sun finds a way down into a deep cleft in the mountain meshed with cypresses and pine, to flare on a distant speck of glass: the sacred pool where twenty...
Religious fiction is the hot line in American bookstores. It isn’t a new genre – Pilgrim’s Progress still sells; what’s new is its popularity and profitability; and, most...
About a third of the way through his first book, The Missing, Andrew O’Hagan pauses over a perception he thinks his readers may find ‘a bit surprising’. It’s an intricate...
I must begin with these stones as the world began. Hugh MacDiarmid From the car park, the duckboard angles up like a runway to the overcast distance – but soon you’re back on solid...
A great Irish lady, her disgraced nephew and a young priest with strong Republican sympathies are driving through Dublin on St Patrick’s Day, 1916. ‘They were speaking of patriots,...
Why is it, Lord, although I’m right I find it hard to sleep at night? I often wake up in a sweat they’ve not found WMDs yet! The thought that preys most on my mind, is maybe the only...
It is a curious thing that of the three judges offering superlatives on the jacket of Hugo Williams’s Collected Poems – Edna Longley, Douglas Dunn and Peter Porter – none is...
The world is allusive. The mantis alludes to a twig To deflect the starling, the starling is a little stare Alluded to by Shakespeare: Jacques-Pierre, His name alluding not to spears or beers Or...
Waking up in a borrowed flat in Camden Town, Cayce Pollard, the heroine of Pattern Recognition, switches on an ‘Italian floor lamp’ powered by ‘British electricity’. She...