A couple of years ago, Paul Auster was asked by a producer at National Public Radio whether he would become a regular contributor to one of the network’s more popular shows. All he’d...
In an unidentified South African city that is probably Johannesburg, in a time that is probably now, a group of people meet in a bohemian café. For 28-year-old Julie it’s not just a...
Another season comes to a close. Sunflowers nod, the mallards grow restive and hoarfrost sparkles on the lawns well into morning. After some discussion, the badminton nets finally come down. For...
There’s no question but that the Paris imprint which has for many years past brought out the likeliest new books, novels especially, is the Editions de Minuit. They’ve managed it by...
The waiting rooms are full of ‘characters’ / Pretending not to sleep. / Your eyes are open / But you’re far away / At home, am Rhein, with mother and the cats.
This is the first part of a two-part interview. Part 2: ‘The Price’.Ian Hamilton died of cancer on 27 December 2001, aged 63. It was a death that the ‘LRB’ has especial...
In a shrewd and sympathetic essay on Dylan Thomas published in The Redress of Poetry, Seamus Heaney found a memorable set of metaphors for Thomas’s poetic procedures: he ‘plunged into...
In his ‘Autobiography’, Benvenuto Cellini (1500-71) tells of summoning demons in the Roman Colosseum with the aid of a priest adept in the black arts. The next night, in hopes of...
The winner of the Glenfiddich Award for the year’s best book about food picks up a nice cheque and a case of single malt. The lucky author who lands the Bollinger Everyman Prize for comic...
‘After the first death,’ Dylan Thomas wrote, ‘there is no other.’ I know what he is getting at, I suppose, but it isn’t true, at least not for me. I have had other...
Perhaps one of the functions of toys is to introduce children to disappointment. When Star Wars was the thing (the first time round) I was given a Darth Vader costume for my birthday. I...
Either you love the jokes or you don’t, with the Mitfords. The biting, ferocious ‘teases’, the flippancy, the apparent inability to take anything particularly seriously, are...
In 1972, when his reputation was close to its peak, Laurens van der Post published a novel called A Story like the Wind. Reviewing it in the TLS, I wrote that it was an old-fashioned colonial...
Their town’s the quaint one: the board won’t let it sprawl more than a half-mile from the green’s little pool-table of grass and shiny tulips where Santa lands in winter and the...
A blank page is frightening. Something has to be written, but how do you choose the words? Why this word and not that? How to overcome the arbitrariness of writing? One way is to trick yourself,...
Here is a characteristic piece of comedy from the Book of Scottish Anecdote (seventh edition, 1888). A gentleman upbraids his servant: is it true, he asks him, that you have had the audacity to...
A parable, says the OED, is ‘a fictitious narrative (usually about something that might naturally occur), by which moral or spiritual relations are typically set forth’....
It never switches off; even asleep we listen in to gravity itself. Crossing a field is one long exercise in equilibrium – a player’s grace – though what we mean by that has more...