At nine fifteen a.m. on the first day of his eighty- first year. Why don’t I first-person myself? I was hoping nobody would ask me that question yet. The strong smell of chlorine for one...
Philip Larkin once wondered what it would be like for a lover to step inside his skull. ‘She’d be stopping her ears,’ he decided, ‘against the incessant recital/Intoned by...
The primal scene of Marginalia takes place at a book-signing by the children’s writer Maurice Sendak. Pushed to the front of the queue by his star-struck parents, a boy begs Sendak not to...
You’ve zoomed through it often enough on the long grind north, the grim dash south – why not take a break? Slip off the motorway at any one of ten...
Haruki Murakami’s translator, Philip Gabriel, describes him as a ‘one-man revolution in Japanese fictional style’. His early novels and short stories of the 1980s –...
In English, zo is not a very useful word. In Scrabble, ZO is the only eligible two-letter word with a Z in it: this makes it almost as useful as QI (neither, incidentally, is allowed in the United States)....
A Sunday at home, since I still called them that, the house, the garden and the patch of lawn in front long gone to weeds and waist-high grasses that I crawled round, hacking wildly with the...
Minor resemblances between this novel by Ian McEwan and Henry James’s What Maisie Knew have already been noticed and are of some interest. James left a quite full record of the development...
I, Morgan, whom the Romans call Pelagius,Am back in my own place, my green Cathures*By the frisky firth of salmon, by the open seaNot far, place of my name, at the end of thingsAs it must seem....
Even now most discussion of Second World War poetry cannot do without reference back to that of the First; and it’s true that Keith Douglas was always conscious of Isaac Rosenberg behind...
Learning to Talk This is our game for now, rehearsing words to make the world seem permanent, and ours; before it disappears, I will have named all we can see, from here to the snow on...
The best thing about Amos Oz’s novel in verse is almost untranslatable: his Hebrew poetry is too dense for any European language to convey. The musicality and rhythm are impressive, and...
Alistair MacLeod is a Canadian of Scottish descent, and, like John McGahern who has written a foreword to his collected stories, an astute observer of a very specific local setting – Cape...
Chicken soup is magic, here’s the proof. Maybe if I’d opened the window a crack it would never have happened. But late in the war, I tip the lid to let the steam off while the broth...
On 1 February 2001 eight writers came to pay homage to James Baldwin in the Lincoln Center in New York. The event was booked out and there were people standing outside desperately looking for...
Andy Martin is unlikely to convince many readers that Napoleon conquered Europe only as compensation for his inability to write a sentimental novel. His attention to the Emperor’s literary...
Freud takes it for granted that masculinity is the defining human condition, that all children begin life by imagining themselves as little men. When girls get round to noticing their lack of a...
In 1924 the Surrealist Benjamin Péret was eager, like many artists then and since, to relate his own interests to the works of the rich, bizarre and innovative French poet, novelist and...