In Pierrot mon ami, the last of the eight novels laid end to end in this life-enhancing volume, the footling but resilient Pierrot works on and off at a fairground, where his job description...
In the spring of 1914 Wittgenstein gave a third of the annual income from his inheritance – 100,000 Austrian crowns – to Ludwig von Ficker, the editor of the journal Der Brenner, to...
Alexandre Dumas was a force of nature. The 650 or so books he published might not seem an extraordinary tally for such as Barbara Cartland, who could dictate six thousand words between lunch and...
Under Dyson’s clock in Lower Briggate was where my courting parents used to meet. It had a Father Time and Tempus Fugit sticking out sideways into the street above barred windows full of...
On the morning of Tuesday, 17 January 1995, shortly before 6 o’clock, the city of Kobe was hit by the largest earthquake to strike Japan since 1923. During the twenty seconds of shaking...
For it is said, they went to school at Gabii, and were well instructed in letters, and other accomplishments befitting their birth. And they were called Romulus and Remus (from...
From the 11th century to the 19th not a single Eric was to be found in England, according to the Harrap Book of Boys’ and Girls’ Names. Then in 1858 the schoolmaster Frederic Farrar,...
A certain monotony characterises saints’ lives, at least when viewed from the outside, and the same goes for writers. The chosen career flattens out the visible differences. If it...
Rummaging around, in a notebook entry of 1896, for the properly grim place to deposit his unfortunate heroine, Maisie Farange, Henry James alights on Folkestone, and with grey satisfaction asks...
On 15 August 1941, Stefan Zweig and his wife set sail for Brazil, where they planned to settle after seven years of exile in England and America. At first he seems to have found the change of...
Then morning comes, saying: ‘This was a night.’ Robert Lowell Broken knights. – No, not like that. Well, no matter. Something agreeably Tennysonian (is there Any other kind?)...
Julie Otsuka’s novella When the Emperor Was Divine tells, in discontinuous sections and different narrative modes, the story of a Japanese-American family split up in the aftermath of the...
Quips and Quacks in Vaudeville Quips is dressed like a clown. He holds a bicycle horn in his hand that farts when he squeezes it and he has a bright red bulb on his nose. Quack, his partner, is...
In the age of Sophocles or of Shakespeare, tragic drama concerned the deaths of nobles and notables, individuals whose lives were closely entwined with the health of the state. In the 19th...
The tenth and central chapter of Michael Slater’s biography is entitled ‘Jerrold, Dickens, Thackeray’. This, as Slater reminds us (often), is the company his contemporaries...
‘I am owed,’ says Dave Eggers – or ‘Dave Eggers’ – in his much admired A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Owed, that is, the right to publish a memoir...
Ferrari Student poser, presbyterian swami, When Being and Nothingness ruled the Kelvin Way, I rebelled by carrying a rolled umbrella To lectures. I never finished La Nausée. Chaperoned...
The OuLiPo, or Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. The group’s initiatory text was a sequence of ten sonnets...