In March 1815, Madame d’Arblay, the woman we know better as Fanny Burney, was forced by the arrival of Napoleon from Elba to flee Paris and to leave behind almost all her possessions....
In Nani Power’s novel Crawling at Night, Katsuyuki Ito has only been in New York, his new home, for a few months. On the surface, his life in the United States is exactly the same as it was...
The Late Game That sleepwalking waiter Carrying a tower of plates Is he coming to our table, Or is he going to walk right out of the door? He’s going to walk right out of the door. A...
In the obituaries of R.K. Narayan (1906-2001), written by the ‘talkative men’ of modern India who once knew the writer slightly or quite well, there were one or two remarks about his...
Ignazio Silone was one of Italy’s most respected 20th-century novelists. His best-known work, Fontamara, is a dramatic account of peasant life in the Abruzzi, where he was born in 1900. He...
‘I learned to ski in prison,’ Gregory Corso wrote, having discovered that there’s nothing much for prisoners to do except imagine, fantasise and, what often follows, masturbate....
How you do go on About the politics Of Stockholm – About how too controlled, Too predictable Are the politics of Stockholm; How the politics of Stockholm Are like the citizens of Stockholm,...
‘The nearest approach to this,’ I said, ‘would be a Vermeer.’ Yes, a Vermeer. For that mysterious artist was trebly gifted – with the vision that perceives the...
I Forget the photos. Today I want you when you ruled, When you sailed through the room, my schooner, And men and boys fell on each other in your wake – Today I want your shape, your heft,...
Tony Parsons is the talented journalist who used to play Leonard Bast to Tom Paulin’s rentier intellectual on Late Review, the BBC’s weekly parade of Schlegelisms. He was the mean...
At André Malraux’s funeral, in November 1976, two red wreaths were delivered to the cemetery: one came from the French Communist Party, an organisation to which he never belonged, the...
Some writers attract faint praise. Vernon Watkins is more damned by it than most: he is the serene Watkins, walking the Gower peninsula in a cloud of unworldly Christianity, Yeats and (very) late...
Croy. Ee. Gaw. Lonker. Pit.Croy: an animal pen, a rained-on pigsty Snorting with mooning bums of bacon, snouts Spike-haired, buxom, Pictish-beasty, rank.Croy. Ee. Gaw. Lonker. Pit. Croy. Once,...
György Petri (or Petri György, as he would have been called in Hungary) was born in Budapest in 1943 to a family with a Serbian and Jewish background. A year after Petri’s birth,...
In 1830, a few months before he died in a Soho rooming-house, Hazlitt published a lengthy essay on a new biography of Daniel Defoe in the Edinburgh Review, where he remarked that in Robinson...
Since completing the quartet of LA crime novels that made his name, James Ellroy has left us in no doubt that he wants to be more than a genre writer, embarking on a series of books intended to...
There is a novel by John Masefield called ODTAA. Its title stands for ‘One Damn Thing After Another’. This would be a good title for a biography of George Gascoigne. Despite having a...
The Complex Mechanism of the Break From here, ten to fourteen rows of folding and branching. Up close, the laving in overlappings that pool sideways as well as suck back. Filamentary green-trims...