This is a collection of eight stories, the oldest first published in 1975, the most recent in 1999; so they punctuate the entire, brief career of a writer who never yielded to the temptation to go on...
‘In a way he was like the country he lived in, everything came too easily to him.’ Mrs McFarlane told me she heard someone say this in a movie. There was nothing in the movie that...
Koba is in a country no a wilderness province the size of Scotland – nine months of ice and snow they live in caves where his fellow exiles fear the hard glints in his eyes his yellow smoky...
The day he first met Wyndham Lewis, shortly after the end of the First World War, Ernest Hemingway was teaching Ezra Pound how to box. The encounter took place in Paris, where Pound had a studio,...
Henry Green’s masterpieces, like Party Going (1939) and Loving (1945), are devoted to demonstrating the hollowness of traditional loyalties and roles, for all the world as if he were a fictional...
Dryden of course neither wrote nor adapted a Hamlet. But sometimes negatives, or questions, can say as much as positives. And Dryden is perhaps an odder, a more involved figure than might be...
Was God created by a woman, a writer who dreamed up the early stories in the Bible? Differences in vocabulary and style suggest that the Old Testament is a composite of various sources. The...
These figs missed the picker moved to pluck tokens of love or welcome to strangers, missed bird, missed casual snacker, so are burst and outspread as red as hibiscus, scuffed pistil opera plush,...
For Colleen If not the giant redwoods taking centuries to reach the light, nor the lights- camera-action typhoons regular as clockwork in the murky Tonga Bar, nor, perched above LA, the...
for the commemoration at St Andrews University, October 2000 All the Fergussons are black I’ve heard said in the Outback. Sub rosa, the Scots empire ranged wide. I hope Scotland proportions...
T he summer lay there, waiting to finish. Autumn was when the strangers were expected, the hop merchants from Austria, Germany and England, the rich men off whom many people in our town made...
In March 1992 I received a printed invitation from Francis Stuart to a party in Dublin commemorating a party he had given in Berlin on St Patrick’s Day 1941. I wondered, when I read it, why...
What is funny and forlorn, where is the comic pathos, in the following sentence? ‘A fortune-teller once read my cards and said that if it wasn’t for a tiny black cloud hanging over me...
First, a fiery allegory – the reviewer’s house is burning down! After tossing the cats out of the window, she has time only to save one object before fleeing: either a compact disc...
A great many people seemed willing to incur the expense, and the discomfort of prolonged queueing, to see the big Blake exhibition at the Tate.* Some, no doubt, were expert even in the most...
Bolinas is a sleepy little seaside community about an hour’s drive north of San Francisco, at the end of a long, windy road over the hills. It isn’t easy to find the turn-off, and...
When we first meet Lena Rose, the ‘mildly retarded’ heroine and whirlwind centre of Karen Bender’s novel, it is her wedding anniversary, and she has set fire to her room at the...
Leaving the George Inn to walk down the small road to Milldale it is so quiet as the light diminishes pale things begin to glow on the ground. Each tree makes a slight whispering bat flitting...