The beetle runs into the future. He takes to his heels in an action so frantic its flicker seems to possess the slowness of deep water. He has been green. He will be so yet. His memory ripples...
In October 1964, BBC2 put out a programme about literary life in Britain during the Second World War; the contributors included John Betjeman and Cyril Connolly. The show was stolen, however, by...
Margaret Atwood’s 11th novel delivers two huge surprises: a male protagonist and an action-movie plot. Atwood has never written a novel from a male point of view before, and John Updike was...
Description of a Lost Thing It never had a name, Nor do I remember how I found it. I carried it in my pocket Like a lost button Except it wasn’t a button. Vampire movies, All-night...
All I can do is take you to the edge And throw a belvedere Out on the void, fenced in with cabled steel, So there is nothing which you need to fear – As fear you will, Like somebody...
The lounge of a large seaside hotel. A middle-aged Miss Plunkett sits in an upright easy chair, the chair beside it is empty. A middle-aged Mr Mortimer approaches her. MR MORTIMER: Is this...
How do you fight this monster? Three years into the new century, you pick up a handful of stones from the street. You secrete boxcutters and wires. A penknife lies warm in your hand. You wake up...
For Kathleen Jamie Waist-height, clouds of white lace in the abandoned graveyard, the delicate, filigree umbels matching the thumbprints of lichen embroidering the graves. A deep current of blue...
With its energetic cast and insistent street score, it still manages to be poignant without becoming bathetic, and violent without being exploitative. The movie ends as happily as it can, while...
In the spring or summer of 1599, the Chorus of Henry V, in Shakespeare’s only explicit reference to a contemporary politician, looked forward to the return of the 33-year-old Earl of Essex...
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...