Americana Attention, motorists! The flag of the School Patrol is down. Stop! and let the little shavers pour out under the benign smile of the driver, every one in double file, the eye of the...
Towards the end of A.S. Byatt’s first novel about the Potter family, The Virgin in the Garden (1978), the heroine and a clever friend debate the question of whether modern life has rendered...
Big blocks of ice – clear cornerstones – chug down a turning belt toward the blades of a wicked, spinning fan; rotary din of a thousand skates and then powder flies out in a roaring...
child sprung from us both – showing us our ideal, the way – to us! father and mother who in sad existence survive him, like the two extremes – ill-matched in him and sundered...
Count Miklós Bánffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy describes a period of history the author knew at first hand: the decade of Hungarian life before the Great War and the end of the...
This is the third of Michel Houellebecq’s novels, and in it, as in the previous two, his hero yearns, mostly in vain, for men and women who are strangers to each other to reach out...
The prominent headland at Tynemouth in Northumberland was the site of an Anglian monastery before the Benedictine priory was established early in the 11th century. Because of the area’s...
Yann Martel’s novel tells the story of a 16-year-old Indian boy who is shipwrecked in the Pacific and survives 227 days at sea in the company of a Bengal tiger. Since this fact is now well...
It was hidden in her and it gave Kant pleasure. L’Eclisse begins with a wind blowing Monica Vitti’s hair. She is inside a room. Kant’s was a partly negative pleasure. Where is...
Hydrodamalis Gigas after G.W. Steller These beasts are four fathoms long, but perfectly gentle. They roam the shallower waters like sea-cattle and graze on the waving flags of kelp. At the...
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...