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...
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 love Of my life. I drank my coffee On a window seat watching Spring snow...