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...
Julio Llamazares’s novel The Yellow Rain, much praised and much bought when it was published in Spain 15 years ago, tells the story of Ainielle, a small, remote Pyrenean village in the...
A vague mood, a sadness, a feeling as when recovering from illness, a kind of ‘whatever it is which is going on at the time’ mode – a defile bulldozered between trees where the...
Robert Fergusson died in Edinburgh’s Bedlam on 17 October 1774. He was 24 years old. He had been admitted to the asylum three months before, against his will, because his mother could no...
for Xon de Ros and Jamie McKendrick I left a village called Tempo oh maybe an hour back and now I’m driving to Inver in an old beat-up gunked Toyota I’ve borrowed from a mate in...
This is the end of something – although of what exactly it’s not quite clear. The death of D.J. Enright, in December 2002, makes one ask some serious questions about poets and about...
Geoff Dyer announced recently that he wasn’t ‘very interested in character and not remotely interested in story or plot’. For someone who writes novels (I hesitate to use the...
David Jones was staying in the Chelsea flat of the BBC’s Assistant Director of Programme Planning, Harman Grisewood, as the bombs fell on London in the autumn of 1940. During one raid, a...
Annunciation with zero point field Sitting up late in the dark I think you’re about to tell me that story I’ve heard before of a creature pulled from the ice, or prised from a ditch,...