At the very end of The Ring and the Book Browning delivers one of the most staggering mule-kicks ever meted out by an author to his readers. Bear in mind that the poem is more than 21,000 lines...
This book is a sequence or collection of poems and other things concerning events in Europe in the period between the Treaty of Versailles and, broadly speaking, the Battle of Britain. Some of...
John Clearwater, the tormented mathematician in William Boyd’s novel Brazzaville Beach, wants to reduce chaos, flux and turbulence to an elegant set of equations. He’s also an...
Waiting for Someone On the bulkhead over the bar Names of steamers that used to stop here The river silted with new islands and old tyres I’ve been postponing this drink for hours She says,...
Penelope Fitzgerald wrote ‘The Death of a Poet’ in 1980 or 1981, intending it to form part of a group portrait of the writers published by Harold Monro’s Poetry Bookshop in...
Knowing Wales is a valid unit of area (equivalent to 20,770 km2) is much more useful than being prepared to rub noses north of the Arctic Circle. Here are some uses: the Amazon rainforest is being cleared...
The Tartar swept across the plain In their furs and silk panties Snub-nosed monkeymen with cinders for eyes Attached to their ponies like centaurs Forcing the snowy passes of the Carpathians...
After the Movie A cry comes again from the pavilion. I was that nurse and that civilian, I was the song in the carillon. She sat on a tree trunk; no, a boulder. I was the heart inside the...
I hadn’t read a Stewart Home book for years when I started the new one, 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess. Let me be more precise. I hadn’t read a Home book properly since 1996,...
All long-term dictators are alike: all short-term dictators vanish in their own short way. This at least is the assumption of many writers and readers, and in Latin America it amounts to...
I denied my father three times, but he only died once. The Obituaries Editor of the Times was responsible for my first denial. I was living in London with my wife, Jane Sheridan, and things were...
Looking at Rousseau’s ‘Sleeping Gypsy’ For Anna Brodsky A gypsy girl decides to visit her grandmother on the other side of the desert. Carrying a staff, a jar of water to quench...
I want everything. Everything is a naked thought that strikes. A foghorn sounding through fog makes the fog seem to be everything. Quail eggs eaten from the hand in fog make everything...
Of all the great 20th-century critics, I.A. Richards is perhaps the most neglected. There is a crankish, hobbyhorsical quality to his work, an air of taxonomies and technical agendas which befits...
The Indian novel in English goes back a long way, at least to R.K. Narayan, who flourished from the Thirties to the Eighties of the last century. The achievements of Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy...
for John Minihan Nous nous aimerons tous et nos enfants riront De la légende noire où pleure un solitaire. Paul Eluard The sort of snailmail that can take a week but suits my...
Sotiris Dimitriou is best known in Greece as a writer of compact, sometimes brutal stories about people pushed aside by modern life. Distracted by obsessions and false hopes, his migrants, rent...
‘Perhaps it is too soon to call this one of the greatest motion pictures of all time,’ the New York Times said in June 1942, ‘but it is certainly the finest yet made about the...