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...
All Thackeray biographers should feel a pang of guilt. Disgusted by Victorian whitewash memorials, he instructed his daughters: ‘Mind, no biography ... consider it my last testament and...
Ever since her first novel Typical American appeared in 1991, the Chinese American writer Gish Jen has been acclaimed as the new Amy Tan. Amy Tan herself acclaims her on the cover of Mona in the...
A downtown storefront window containing only a single giant plastic ear. * In a San Ángel garden: the four-inch-long orange potato bug called face of a child. * Ancient evil in a...
In 1857, eight years before Kipling was born, Indian soldiers in the north of the country rebelled against the representatives of the East India Company. The uprising was known as the Sepoy...
One Figures in his plans, but briefly, as a cupped hand holds water, or as private and public spheres collide and blur, overlap within his fragile, omnivorous stare. Barely awake, dazed and...
You get off the boat and they call you Paddy – Paddy or Mick of course it’s the same thing and sometimes that nick- name’ll stick as it stuck to me – clamped – mine...
When the Berlin Wall came down ten years ago the publishers Mills and Boon moved swiftly into the breach. In a single day, we are told, their West German office gave away 750,000 copies of...
These days swearing occasionally or having a glass of wine at lunchtime is enough to qualify you as a bit of a character. As newspapers become less important, however, journalists become more self-important,...
But oh, that magic feeling, nowhere to go. Lennon-McCartney I Driving to Mirtiotissa We learned to avoid the village to drive through the olive groves...
In the film about Noël Coward that Adam Low made for Arena in 1998, there is a shot of Arnold Wesker watching a recording of a Royal Court fundraising gala in which Coward is marvellous but...
In one of John Berryman’s more lucid dream songs (No. 364), there is amusing reference to the reading habits of Henry, the song sequence’s screwed up protagonist: O Henry in his...
Fifty-odd years ago I was asked to review a book about Shakespeare by an aged professor who claimed that a career spent largely in teaching Shakespeare gave him a right to have his final say on...