Ralph Ellison wrote his own running commentary on the mammoth fiction he laboured over for the last forty years of his life and failed to finish. When his literary executor John Callahan appended...
In the mid-1940s, Dalton Trumbo was a screenwriter near the top of his lucrative but precarious line of work: fast, prolific and a consummate professional, he usually wrote at night, often in the...
The best thing on Stendhal in English is an essay by Lytton Strachey in which he remarks the way the author denovelises the novel while skilfully retaining all its traditional apparatus....
i Not him – he’s where no fears can find nor torments touch him – it’s his Mum has the details, who told the head- master, who talked to the press....
Perhaps, in order to find Molesworth utterly hilarious, it is necessary to have read it as a child. Wendy Cope claims to ‘hav been reading this stuff and roaring with larffter since i was...
Marginalia can sometimes seem the best way into a writer’s head. Those, like Blake and Coleridge, who could not help scribbling in the margins of what they were reading let us imagine their...
We met at the bar concealed behind a false front in the alley behind a curtain dyed purple and green down the stairs to the shuttered room baking in the Summer of Love, a country girl, dark...
The hero of Celeste Olalquiaga’s book is a hermit crab encased in a glass globe which she has chosen to christen ‘Rodney’. She first encountered Rodney, as she recounts, in a...
Young Harry Potter’s parents are dead. So far, so good: many of the heroes and heroines of the classics of children’s literature are orphans, while others have invisible, unmentionable or irrelevant...
Above all else we are concerned, in whatever form we let it take us, with memory. The idea of memory enables us to believe we can grasp the vanished past, historical or personal, and restructure...
The Swimmer For Brighde The japonica and laurels tremble as the wind picks up out the west-facing wall of the old natatorium, made wholly of glass. The swimmer takes her laps, steady and sure...
Archimedes’ first words were ‘Stand away from my diagram.’ Sir Richard Burton’s first word was ‘Chloroform.’ Chang’s first words were ‘I...
Anthologies attract good haters. In the 1790s, the reformer Hannah More blamed their editors for the decay of morals: to let people assume that you had read the entire work from which an...
Pale Siblings Cheerio. Nothing on the shore today. Far out to sea, some eczema mimicking sunlight and shadow, with but temporary success. Was it for wandering that I have been punished? Or was it...
The sign said immunology but I readilluminology: and look, heaven is a platinum latitude over Fifth, fogged result of sun-brushed steel, pearl dimensions. Cézanne: ‘We are an...
For Robert Adamson A blue smear bulges over the ridge; there’s the counterpoint as well of shine on white-hot duco glimpsed on the ute parked outside on the driveway. It blinds its surrounds...
In the English popular imagination, the grimly oligarchic Old South Africa, with its smug suburban swimmingpools, bullish police force, forbidden wines and ostracised sports teams, has become the...
In a recent poem, ‘Languedoc Variorum: A Defence of Heresy and Heretics’, the American poet Ed Dorn honours Donald Davie’s penultimate collection of poems, To Scorch or Freeze...