For the umpteenth time I looked out at the sea but there was nothing to catch my eye, just a man wheeling a barrow up the beach. I looked again, frisking the whole expanse for a ship, a boat, any...
Once more upon the waters! yet once more! And the waves bound beneath me as a steed That knows his rider.On 25 April 1816, Byron set out from Dover for the Continent, never to return to England....
Jove and Semele were not well-matched. She was spoiled and silly. He was clever. The things she really wanted from him were A literal god-child, and to live for ever. Folie de grandeur, Congreve...
The wedding was like a dream outside her power, or like a show unmanaged by her in which she was to have no part. The Member of the Wedding How to account for the vagaries of literary...
Mesopotamia comes across as a sad place. Almanacs of the Middle East will tell you that it has its fair share of sunshine, but it is easier to imagine it under a leaden sky. Mesopotamia –...
Michael Reynolds is the marrying kind of biographer: president of the Hemingway Society, he has published a 140-page annotated chronology of Hemingway’s life, a 2300-item inventory of...
Bar Italia How beautiful it would be to wait for you again in the usual place, not looking at the door, keeping a look out in the long mirror, knowing that if you are late it will not be too...
On 16 June 1783, Samuel Johnson was rendered speechless by a stroke. His first action was not to try croaking for a doctor, but to compose a prayer in Latin: ‘The lines were not very good,...
‘She would, if asked, tell us many little particulars about the subsequent career of her people,’ Jane Austen’s nephew wrote in his Memoir of his aunt. In this traditionary way...
The appearance of this book on 30 January, the 350th anniversary of the cold morning when the axe fell on Charles Stuart’s neck, was no mere romantic gesture. Rather, it declared David...
Christmastime in Coronado The attack jets comes in low over the ocean past the tennis courts and the Duchess’s cottage, in tandem low over the Navy golf-course headed for the North Island...
The estate at dawn hangs like smoke; the forest drawn in grainy bands of smeared, cross-hatched, illegible trees: a botched photocopy of itself. Swamp maple, sugar maple, red and white oak; first...
A useless art, yet half the world has mastered it. Small plants to occupy the foreground, a pine-needle fence. Bracken uncurls to a thin tree; a salient overlooks the world. She must resist the...
‘It is fatal for a woman,’ Virginia Woolf wrote, ‘in any way to speak consciously as a woman.’ Fatal for her as a writer, Woolf meant, but even so, not many people will...
needed explanation because of the mystic nature of the theory and our reliance on collective belief I could not visualise the end the tools that paved the way broke the body the foundation the...
‘Transition began and of course it meant a great deal to everybody,’ Gertrude Stein wrote in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, her story of ‘how two americans happened to be...
The Green Woman Until we’re restored to ourselves by weaning, the skin jade only where it’s hidden under jewellery, areolae still tinged, – there’s a word for women like...
The first time we – that’s we the reading public – met Dr Hannibal Lecter, he was lying on his cot in his cell at the Chesapeake State Hospital for the Criminally Insane with a...