The point at which the consequences of global warming will become inescapable is often placed around 2050. By then the world’s present population will, according to some estimates, have...
The Mithraeum God-mulch. Apollo. Coventina. Snapped-off moons and pre-Christian crosses Pit the tor. Comeback king, Midas-touch Mithras, his moorland shrines Dank caves or knee-high proto-kirks...
In 1679 a small book with the resonant title Order and Disorder; or, the world made and undone was published in London. The title was intended to touch a nerve. The Restoration crisis had never...
Ann Widdecombe should now have time to finish her second novel. It was due for publication this summer, but had to be deferred till next year because of the election campaign. The heroine of An...
A wineglass of water on the windowsill where it will catch the light. Now be quiet while I think. And groan. And blink. I am anxious about the wineglass. It’s an expert at staying awake....
‘Of course I like my country,’ Gore Vidal has written. ‘After all, I’m its current biographer.’ With the publication of The Golden Age, the biography draws to a...
‘The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of angels and God, and at liberty when of devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing...
A House A calendar under the couch Was several years old. It wasn’t My house. A note with crisp Letters, You are the loveOf my life. I drank my coffee On a window seat watching Spring snow...
Among the more unusual relics of the fishing industry in Hull’s maritime museum is a holed fragment of the trawler Mino, sunk off the Dogger Bank in October 1904. At the time, the Russian...
The penguin is called Misha and lives with Viktor Alekseyevich Zolotaryov in his bachelor flat in Kiev. His eyes are small and melancholy. Viktor adopted him the year before the story begins,...
Seated obscurely towards the back of the church and on a side aisle, Treacher was conscious nevertheless of being much looked at. Tall, thin and with a disagreeable expression, were this a film...
There are three false starts in David Mitchell’s slippery new novel. At the beginning of number9dream the narrator sits in a chaotic Tokyo café staring into an empty coffee cup. Eiji...
Becoming the person you have always been inside cannot be rushed. Dressing up in secret clothes at home – batiks and silks, caftans, sarongs – is all that you may need. If not,...
A little over thirty years ago, John Ashbery delivered a lecture at the Yale Art School called ‘The Invisible Avant-Garde’, in which he asked whether the distinction between the...
Marie Catherine Sophie de Flavigny, Comtesse d’Agoult (born Frankfurt, 1805; died Paris, 1876) is famous for two contrasting reasons. In 1835, she left her husband for Franz Liszt. The affair...
Stephen Greenblatt has moved on, or back, and not only from Berkeley to Harvard. He ended Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) with an account of Othello similar in shape to his present account of
an episode from the ‘Ramayana’ retold by Amit Chaudhuri She’d been watching the two men for a while, and the pale, rather docile wife with vermilion in her hair, who sometimes...
In the Regeneration trilogy, Pat Barker distilled the trauma and drama of the First World War into a series of minutely observed pairings between the neurologist William Rivers and his severely...