When Allen Tate died in 1979, Simon and Schuster speedily commissioned a biography, to be written, they announced, by Ned O’Gorman, a poet of some reputation and a friend of two of...
For Nikos The Union of Moldavian Cinematographers had a film archive where they showed European and American movies, but only to members of the Union itself. Located in a large crimson villa...
Montreal A shriek hits the membrane that canopies the street, falls, and the trough gets it. Sediment thickens with it, the dust of voices, the smoky penumbra around street lamps, finally...
In December 1501 the Scottish poet William Dunbar received £5 from the Court of King James IV, a payment which was given to him, according to the Treasurer’s accounts, ‘eftir he...
A fairytale, whatever messages may be inserted into it or teased out from it, is a tale of marvels. A cat struts past in boots. A demon swells out from a lamp like steam from a kettle. A princess...
After Machado Dear common flies, ubiquitous and greedy, how well you conjure up those times that have gone. Old flies guzzling like bees in April, old flies launching raids on my new-born head....
New historicism was a 1980s thing, a literary critical movement that took shape on the West Coast, becoming established there and elsewhere as what one could talk about after having talked for...
It is hard to make a living from poetry. Lavinia Greenlaw has turned her hand to all manner of activities to support her work – publishing, teaching, arts administration, posts as...
Queuing for Charon 1 Cretans still can’t stand ‘the Krauts’ but don’t turn them away, gaga ex-Nazis, lager louts, cramming Crete on holiday. Fifty-odd years of so-called...
One of the best stories in Neonlit: ‘Time Out’ Book of New Writing Volume 2 (1999) is ‘Shelf Life’ by Tom Bromley. The story’s working title, which mysteriously...
The main title of this collection may at first seem wantonly non-descriptive, but it turns out to be exact. The first thing to see to if you want to write well is to avoid doing bad writing, used...
There are those who like to mortise a plot, carefully and neatly, and there are those who are content simply to bang it together with panel pins and a tube or two of Gripfill. Jonathan Coe is...
1 Are you still Chinese yellow? Are your blinds still drawn against prying eyes on the tops of buses? How well I remember you, perched beside a traffic-light on the corner of Ladbroke Grove, our...
Philology has a bad name as a discipline encouraging sterile pedantry. Today, few could cite a contemporary practitioner. But the discipline had at least one remarkable after-life, contradicting...
Imagination must take the strain when facts are few. As information about the domestic life of polygamous Oriental households was fragmentary, 17th, 18th and 19th-century European writers and...
If someone were to ask why art and culture have proved so vital to the modern age, one might do worse than reply: to compensate for the decline of religion. It is certainly a more convincing...
Family Album In this one you look miles away And I’m wearing a tolerant half-smile That seems to say I’ve fixed things rather well. What things? The turreted edifice behind us I...
Martin Amis’s memoir, Experience, was recently published in paperback. The banned ads have returned to the Underground, now that the offending image of the boy Amis ‘smoking’ in...