Western curiosity about other lands has a long history as a literary phenomenon – its fashionable origins are generally dated to the Grand Siècle, the time of the voyages to Mughal...
The Gods of Fairness The failure to see God is not a problem God has a problem with. Sure, he could see us if he had a hankering to do so, but that’s not the point. The point is his concern...
The season was spring, trees Were sprouting leaves, meadows Were green, every morning Birds sang in their own Sweet language, and the world was joyful. And the son of the widowed lady Living...
Although Surrey’s surviving poems can be read in an afternoon, they represent a major achievement for someone whose life was cut short (literally: he was beheaded) at the age of 30. He...
The Anglo-Boer War broke out on 11 October 1899. Two and three-quarter years later, at a conservative estimate, 22,000 Britons, 25,000 Boers and at least 12,000 Africans were dead: Anglo-Boer...
In the pocket of my dinner-jacket, because I can’t bring myself to throw it away, is a slip of paper bearing in a neat italic hand the words ‘I expect you have remembered to ask the...
Past-Lives Therapy They explained to me the bloody bandages On the floor in the maternity ward in Rochester, NY, Cured the backache I acquired bowing to my old master, Made me stop putting...
Writing in 1887 of the proposal to establish an Anglo-Saxon-based school of English at Oxford, the moral philosopher Thomas Case protested that ‘an English School will grow up, nourishing...
Flush becomes a ‘nobody’, an ambiguous fantasy of physical emancipation which, like Virginia Woolf’s notion of androgyny, tries to transcend human sexuality and its relentless polarising of masculine...
Günter Grass stands so prominently in the line of fire of Germany’s still polarised and politicised cultural life, and has been sniped at so often since The Rat (1986) – A Wide...
A nervous young lawyer leaves a rabbi’s house with a sinking feeling. The arguments that he had prepared now seem hopeless: he couldn’t persuade the immigrants that their...
Fruitility What a glorious gift from Gaia, raspberries piled on papaya, which as a ruse to lift my soul I serve up in my breakfast bowl, and, contemplating, celebrate nature’s fruit, and...
‘I ought to have been among other things a good poet,’ Thomas Lovell Beddoes wrote in the postscript to the brief and perfunctory note he left before swallowing a lethal dose of...
Václav Havel’s life would seem to be an unrivalled success story: the Philosopher-King, a man who combines political power with a global moral authority comparable only to that of the...
The Armley Hippo Brickfield workmen turned up a quern and bones in clay – gigantic, not Christian, a prodigious thigh and forearmaroused their curiosity ... Eighteen fifty...
‘You know, in my family,’ remarks a gay Irish architect in Colm Tóibín’s The Blackwater Lightship, ‘my brothers and sisters – even the married ones...
‘The personal life is dead,’ Pasternak wrote in Doctor Zhivago – ‘history has killed it.’ In J.M. Coetzee’s new novel, Disgrace, which is set in a violent...
We have sat here in too many poetry readings Wearing the liberal rictus and cursing our folly, Watching the lightbulbs die and the curtains rot And the last flies departing for Scunthorpe....