My News Now that the sun has made it over the tops of the opposite houses, flaring through the wrecks of wallflowers and marguerites, the seeds from giant purple flowers spiral up over the graves...
‘The painters have paid too much attention to the ism and not enough to the painting,’ William Carlos Williams wrote in 1928. Something similar could be said about Williams’s...
At the beginning of James Lasdun’s novel, Lawrence Miller, a professor of gender studies at a college on the outskirts of New York, is interrupted while reading a book. When he returns to...
Trudging These Roads What good does it do you To complain, Charles? The fates shuffling your cards Are old and blind. You may as well look for them In every nursing home in Tennessee. One day...
Karl Kraus had many enemies, but his friends and admirers are something of a liability too. They insist on his unremitting probity and passion for justice, but his justice was all his own –...
Native Language Overnight I’ve listened to thirty Vancouver stories, Not leaving my room. My jet-lagged ear Tunes in to verticals beaming cold H2O Ten levels higher, twenty ceilings below,...
Welcome. Ahaa, or should I say Yee-haa!, because I, Alan Partridge, am broadcasting live from Las Vegas, US of A, stateside. I promise you tonight we’ll have a real half-pound cheeseburger...
The setting is a lake in Leitrim, near the beginnings of the River Shannon, not far from the Border. The nearest town isn’t referred to by name, though if you spend long enough looking at...
Michael Frayn’s new novel is a loss-of-innocence story in which an elderly narrator is prompted to disinter long-buried memories of a particular time and place. Slowly at first, a narrative...
As Olivier Todd once said, parents read Tintin after their children: they read Astérix before the children can get their hands on the books.
This is the second part of a two-part interview. Part 1: ‘You Muddy Fools’ I want to ask you about Robert Lowell: as an influence on your work, that is, and only then as what he...
Do you hear sighing. Do you wake amid a sigh. Radio sighs...
There are good reasons, and a few bad ones, for lifting minor characters out of famous texts and putting them centre-stage. One bad reason might be that refiguring a large reputation quietly...
La Fontaine’s permanent place in the schoolroom has made him the most widely read of all French writers. Children take his menagerie of talking flora and fauna in their stride. Grown-ups,...
In the United States, ‘English’ can mean ‘spin’: a deliberate turn put on a ball by striking it so that it swerves. It’s a subtle epithet, perhaps recording a canny...
Not first sight, often enough, but a second look – it is a mysterious thing with poetry that it finds its own moment. The poets that have meant most to me – Lowell, Bishop, Schuyler...
With a few soft words Her Majesty Christened the liner built as ‘504’: ‘I name this ship – Myself. God bless . . .’ The towering masterpiece of the...
Tim Lott’s first novel, White City Blue, came out in 1999. The narrator, Frankie Blue, is a West London estate agent. His best friends are Tony, Nodge and Colin. Diamond Tony –...