The Excavation Travelling ends. Fur’s losing condition. Brittle, each ginger hair-tip will snap. Rubbed patches appear on the rump as they squeeze into underground tunnels, flatten...
On the second day of the second month 2003 we were walking through Beeston – it looked that Sunday more like a wet Northern than a wet Midland town with big strange pollarded trees on both...
To be nothing but fire not even the fuel that feeds it wasn’t my father’s style. When the time came for him to die (of a cirrhotic liver caused by poisoned blood flushed through him...
Ian Gilmour’s deft and learned book is concerned with the lives of Byron and Shelley up to the morning on which Byron woke up and found himself famous. The poets weren’t to meet for...
Everybody Had Lost Track of Time The wide open door of a church. The parked hearse with bald tyres. The grandmother on the sidewalk Leaning on a cane and cupping her ear. The lodger no one has...
No Man’s Land: I Every day I walk this tightrope of tarmac, blown toppling in the wake of juggernauts. I walk it to learn the line of the road, to keep my place on it. When I was a lad my...
Richard Yates faced some formidable obstacles: a broken home, tuberculosis, rampant alcoholism, divorce (twice), lack of recognition and manic depression – a combination that sent him, as...
‘He has enormously increased the difficulties of being a novelist.’ Perhaps only a writer of very High Modernist tendencies would take this remark as a compliment, but Thomas Mann...
Story of a Man last time a man was sealed in skin like an inspoken word sealed in it was mid-spring, most people arm in arm, most trees whispering and he could just make out the fluttering light...
Old men can be buggers at hanging on. Hamish Henderson, who died last March at the age of 82, hung on firmly through three books, edited by others: his writings on ‘Song, Folk and...
Nicola Barker usually stages her plots in suburbs or on islands. Behindlings is set on Canvey, a suburban island. The protagonist, Wesley, is either the leader or the target of what may or may...
Fishing at the Falls Beer is cold in the water A breeze is cold behind us, A draught from shadow, where it Is cavelike, the wall eaten under, A moody huddling, where rock Has fallen from the...
The new volume of poems by my Harvard colleague Jorie Graham, in its US edition, bears on its jacket a detail from Vermeer’s The Astronomer, showing the hand of the astronomer as it...
About fifty or sixty years ago, at the end of a century or more of unenthusiasm, Measure for Measure came into its own. A largely moral or metaphysical explanation of its quality helped it to...
Almost five years ago the Cape Town publishing company David Philip brought out Way Up Way Out, a novel by Harold Strachan. Some time later I was sent a copy of the book by a friend of...
The Tree House Hands on a low limb, I braced, swung my feet loose, hoisted higher, heard the town clock toll, a car breenge home from a club as I stooped inside. Here, I was unseeable. A bletted...
John Banville’s heroes seem to be in search of a centre or subject for their ruminations. Ghosts pester them; voices ring in their ears. Something vital has gone wrong and they must take...
The first answer is Beckett’s in another context – to ‘Mr Beckett they say that you are English?’ he answered ‘au contraire’ – he didn’t say...