The noises of the sperm whale are unlike the lyric hootings and musings of the humpback, whose ‘songs’ won him a place in the LP charts in the 1970s. Recordings of the humpback were...
Antony and Cleopatra swam at Mersa Matruh In the clear blue shallows. Imagine the clean sand, the absence of litter – No plastic bottles or scraps of styrofoam packing, No jetsam at all...
Greek tragedy contributed to the mise en scène of Donna Tartt’s first novel, The Secret History (1992). Four classics students, privileged even by the standards of the elite Vermont...
What exactly is book history? Literature students consulting their reference libraries would be hard put to find an answer: ‘history of the book’ appears nowhere in M.H....
Have you ever tried to write a Victorian novel? Here’s a beginning, with apologies to Sarah Waters and Michel Faber (and a nod to George MacDonald Fraser): London, 1860. November. A...
Richard Flanagan trained as a historian, and his novels have often emphasised the redemptive power of memory. For his characters, though, remembering is a strenuous business. There are traps to...
I walk in a shower of ice on the Finnmarksvidda: freezing rain, not snow; hard pearls of ice, stinging my face and hands as I make my way to the frozen lake. No sign of life – just scats...
In 1936 Denton Welch, who was then an art student at Goldsmiths College and had no thoughts of becoming a writer, suffered an appalling accident. He was bicycling from Greenwich down the main...
Both these outstanding women novelists have decided, with deliberate and rewarding feminist intent, to resuscitate and make central the lives of women whose stories have been overshadowed by the...
Alice Sebold’s first novel, The Lovely Bones, was on its 11th US printing by the end of the summer and was sitting at the top of the New York Times bestseller list, a place usually reserved...
Fame came early to George Barker, but not so early as to take him by surprise. He designed his own ‘crypto-Renaissance catafalque’ at the age of 13, just to be on the safe side, and a...
A new edition of Aristophanes’ Acharnians, by S. Douglas Olson, was published recently (Oxford, £65), in time for George Bush not to read it before he blunders into Iraq....
April of that year in the one country was unusually clear and with brisk northeasterlies ‘straight from the Urals’. Their ancient regent at long last succumbed and laid to rest after...
Mark Doty specialises in ekphrasis. The word once meant the description of a work of visual art within a poem, but has come to mean poetic description more generally. Sometimes Doty describes a...
At the end of the second chapter of Middlesex, the first chronologically, Lefty and Desdemona Stephanides, brother and sister, are dancing in the grape arbour outside their house in the village...
In his essay on Lancelot Andrewes, T.S. Eliot wrote about ‘relevant intensity’. Contemporary British and American writers are in love with what might be called irrelevant intensity....
I am your record-player, your idiot companion,/you glum I dumb you gay hey! hey! I go put Don Giovanni on/you break for lunch I break for lunch I stop
Those who argued that 11 September could change the direction of contemporary fiction soon had a facer. The Corrections, published a week before the terrorist attacks, became a runaway...