My father told me to return to my birthplace,the cave of Amnisos, and wait for a woman,that she would need me. I knew what that meant –he’d impregnated another mortal whore.I returned...
Quite apart from the fact that the text of Catullus is a conjectural amender’s paradise, with lacunae and all kinds of textual S&M to be performed on it for the pleasure, or possibly the pain, of both...
It seems, in the end, that an obsession with words, their proper order and their etymologies, is nothing less than a search for proof that time existed.
The CIA equipped and paid Central American rebels, and hired US mercenaries to fly bombers over Guatemala City, dropping first leaflets then bombs, while the US navy blockaded the coast. The coup could...
In the summer of 1849, Arthur Hugh Clough went to dinner with the writer Jane Octavia Brookfield. ‘I tried to talk with him, but he has the most peculiar manner I almost ever saw,’...
Last Poemi.m. Derek MahonWe value them, the voicesthat need us least, who speakwith honest subtletyto ironies beyond us,who slip our grasp and gowhistling down endlesscelestial colonnadesof...
The Londoners of Keith Ridgway’s A Shock, who live in a part of the city roughly bounded by Brixton, Camberwell and Peckham, suffer from a condition familiar to inhabitants of mighty, superficially...
Are weextinct yet. Who ownsthe map. May Ilook. Where is myclaim. Is my historyverifiable. Have Iincluded the memoryof the animals. The animals’memories. Are theystill here. Are wealone....
I am haunted by the figure of Rolanda Polonsky, walking through the hospital corridors. If my eight-year-old self had opened the doors that frightened me I might have found her, back then, exactly as she...
The narrator of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s pair of novels, The Sympathiser (2015) and The Committed, is one of the more irresistible characters in recent American fiction. He smokes, he drinks,...
It’s characteristic of the perverse workings of the novel that Damon Galgut should insist on providing a trivial continuity immediately after he has erased a necessary one. If the domestic realism...
My brother’s words when I hear them these days seem not to go into my ears – but down some other deeper artery. He said, ‘It’s mother’s house and I just think of it...
all daypersonifying plantsEvil NettleFascist Weedboing boingI do not want youmatter out of placeI rip you outI favour the desiredthe useful to me to me to me!meanwhile stars doing themselvesin the...
As someone who once never had to write down an appointment or a phone number, I take the inevitable weakening of memory that comes with ageing hard. A common response to I forget is Don’t worry, if it’s...
The war is over in A Passage North but its impact is still being felt; damaged limbs can be repaired or replaced with prosthetic ones but injuries to the mind persist. His character’s sufferings are...
The first true crime craze – the distant antecedent of our own docu-drama craze – proved to be an essentially Elizabethan phenomenon. I would place its high-water mark in the year 1599, when A Warning...
One of the last things Gertrude Beasley wrote before her disappearance in 1927 was an article called ‘I Was One of Thirteen Poor White Trash’. It came out in Hearst’s...
In essays and interviews, Jonathan Franzen acknowledged that his over-full sentences and abstruse metaphors were intended to impress graduate students and his father. Money, fame, the imprimatur of Oprah’s...