1 . . . A mist had come in and sunlight ran in shafts and pieces through it. Then rising on the Point ahead was an arch of whale’s jaw-bones, two mandibles curving against grey,...
I am going to end up talking about love, but let me start by talking about money. Money, as Marx tells us, is the enemy of mankind and social bonds. ‘If you suppose man to be man and his...
Thetis, the mythical self-transforming nereid, could be the shape-shifting guiding presence behind these three books. Carol Ann Duffy and Jo Shapcott write poems about her, or more exactly...
Car Graveyard This is where all our joy rides ended: Our fathers at the wheel, our mothers With picnic baskets on their knees As we sat in the back with our mouths open. We were driving straight...
Margaret Atwood was to become a world success with The Handmaid’s Tale, a science-fiction-like horror story, the story of a terrible imaginary place and society, a dystopia. And in The Blind Assassin...
Principalities of June Original light broke apart, the Gnostics say, when time began, singular radiance fractioned into form – an easy theory to believe, in early summer, when that...
With the decline of religious faith, we drift, so it’s said, on the current, clinging to the raft of materialism. The last flickers of collective spiritual belief were doused by the...
Letitia Elizabeth Landon was one of the 19th century’s most romantic figures. When The Improvisatrice came out in 1824, she was described in the press as the female Byron, the English...
Once upon a time, authors were believed to improve their work in revision. Then editorial theory fell in love with first versions, stigmatising second thoughts as impositions. The old...
The poems in this volume will not persuade anyone to care for Shelley who does not do so already: they are often bad, sometimes dreadful, juvenile works which Shelley wrote between the ages of 17...
A woman at the counter of the newsagent I was in was charged £25. I looked over to see what she could have been buying. Twenty Benson and Hedges, a packet of crisps – and a clutch of...
Between 1938 and 1940, the Italian-American writer John Fante published three books. The first two – Wait until Spring, Bandini (1938) and Ask the Dust (1939) – were novels; the...
then thrown back, like a long-finned, too bony fish, I finally took him at his word, and felt the lateness of the hour acquire a dense, rippling aura that weighed down these eyelids, pressed...
Robert Alter established a whole school of literary appreciation of the Bible some twenty years ago with a pioneering book on Biblical narrative. Now he gives us his own translation and...
Towards the end of And When Did You Last See your Father? (1993), Blake Morrison says:Stand them up against grief, and even the greatest poems, the greatest paintings, the greatest novels...
There’s been a bit of fuss recently over whether, and with what definition, the word Blairism should appear in new dictionaries. The Compact Oxford found no room for it, saying that the...
‘Calme bloc ici-bas chu d’un désastre obscur’ (‘calm block fallen here below from some obscure disaster’): this line from Mallarmé’s ‘Le...
‘We all know of writers who just keep writing the same book, but what is sadder is when a true writer seems to run out of books. T.S. Eliot observed that to continue to develop...