The Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot in Sarajevo in 1914 by a young Serb called Gavrilo Princip – and so the First World War began. Jaroslav Hasek, writing in the early 1920s, added a...
Philip Roth likes, or has liked, to describe himself as a ‘suppositional’ novelist. Much of his writing practice, he has said, takes off from a ‘what if?’ What if Franz...
Empson has been dead these 16 years, and although his voice was often recorded it now seems difficult to describe it. John Haffenden says he had one voice for poetry and another for prose. Empson...
Junkie The old suspension bridge was shaking. The junkie on the rail was making One last hazy calculation, Climbed over, dropped his desperation With his body. The grey river Closed on thin flesh...
Douglas Coupland has a special relationship with furniture. A page in the March 2000 issue of Wallpaper magazine puffs his own designs for a target-shaped occasional table, a Damien Hirst-spotted...
Wild Bees At first they come singly, outriders clinging to a thorn, a blade in my path, or hovering inches from my cheek, and then they’re faster, thicker, a dark whiplash, a moving...
Poets whose work has a kinship with that Ezra Pound are likely to be ignored. This is the case with the American poet John Peck, who, now in his late fifties, with a massive and challenging...
Mostly Walter Benjamin would pass the day in libraries or read feverishly in his room far into the night – The Arcades Project is testimony to his being incurably un rat de bibliothèque – but he savoured...
The Oxford English Dictionary cites more than 33,000 passages from Shakespeare to illustrate the sense of English words. About 1900 of its main entries have first citations from Shakespeare....
In the wake of the Second Vatican Council, some progressively minded Catholics began to reintroduce into the Mass the ancient practice of public confession. Individuals would rise from their pews...
A New Jerusalem in memoriam D.H.C. Hughes 1924-1979 Your mother rattled in whisky sodas. Above the fire a print of the Beagle on Pacific swell, 1835; a mantel of peaked caps and wedding veils, your...
Simon Anholt is a very successful advertising copywriter, ‘widely recognised as one of the world’s most influential and respected consultants to corporations seeking to market their...
Ha Jin’s Waiting, a love story set in China at the time of the Cultural Revolution, won last year’s US National Book Award for Fiction, and has just received the less munificent, but...
The stars are filtering through a tree outside in the moon’s silent era. Reality is moving layer over layer like crystal spheres now called laws. The future is right behind your head; just...
The Grief Maps You find the manuals (‘How to Mourn’) on Borders’ Self-Help shelves. ‘Imagine this to be your Trail Guide in a park. Starting from Point Death, the paths...
Michael Hofmann’s poetry is a lament for a lost world. Some years ago, in an article on Frank O’Hara, he talked about New York no longer being the thrilling place it had been in the...
Jason Brown’s sometimes excellent first book is a collection of stories mostly set in and around Portland, Maine. His subject is what Sherwood Anderson, a pioneer of the genre, called the...
One day in 1914, Ford Madox Ford, then 40 years old and feeling it, found himself for a while in the custody of the youthful Percy Wyndham Lewis, a writer whose work had appeared in Ford’s...