Willy Muller, the 50-year-old narrator of Everything You Know, confides at the beginning of the novel that he doesn’t understand his girlfriend’s attachment to him. He treats her...
One of the least predictable roles played by the Devil in popular literature was that of literary adviser and agent in Marie Corelli’s The Sorrows of Satan, the outstanding bestseller of...
When Tolstoy died in November 1910, one of the principal characters in Ahdaf Soueif’s new novel felt bereaved: ‘I have derived more enjoyment from Anna Karenina and War and...
When the celebrated violinist Joseph Joachim visited Schumann in the asylum at Endenich, near Bonn, in May 1855, he discovered that the composer – by this time in the tertiary stage of...
Shoes Once Shod in a Blacksmith’s Shop Shoes once shod in a blacksmith’s shop rust on hooves lying on the rough edge...
The other day, I went to Waterstone’s in the Charing Cross Road to buy a copy of The Rules, the notoriously neo-conservative American dating manual which was a huge hit when it was first...
From a Weekend First One for the money. Arrangements in green and grey from the window of an empty dining-car. No takers for this Burgundy today apart from me. I’ll raise a weighted stem to...
It is not necessarily a disadvantage for a writer to be childish and shameless. In his writing, I mean. Dante was a great genius and the master of a highly elaborated theology and cosmogony....
‘There was once a story that was told by way of other stories,’ the narrator tells a lover in ‘A story of love’, the final piece in Ali Smith’s second collection:...
The entomologist Henri Fabre tells how the cicada’s song is produced by its ‘musical thighs’ and how in Provençal folklore the source of the sound is thought to be the...
10 March. At 6:45 a.m. I set off by car service to Newark airport to catch the 10 a.m. Virgin/Continental flight to Gatwick. At this time of the morning the New Jersey Turnpike is too busy...
To her the kissing group of husbands and wives was like a gang of schoolgirls in the laundry, all fuss and bother, no proper theory of how sexuality is conditioned by the economic strictures of...
Geoffrey Hill the poet is often washing his hands. Sensuous but deeply penitential, his poetry visits waves of scruple upon itself. No contemporary poet has a more contrite ear for the...
The Politicisation of poetry can sometimes bring back to vivid life the poet’s original outlook and preconceptions: it can also misunderstand them. A poem that comes off, and takes off,...
After those months at sea, we stank worse than the Ark. Faeces of all species, God’s first creation, cooped human and brute, between wind and water, bound for this pegged-out plain in the...
Writing in the Tablet in 1951, Evelyn Waugh described Christopher Isherwood as the best of those British writers who had ‘captured’ the Thirties. It was not, Waugh being Waugh, high...
In the rich American vocabulary of abuse for the white rural poor, hicks and hayseeds connote ignorance but also innocence. The Hill-billie of Mathews’s Dictionary of Americanisms (1900) is...
Russian history is full of turning points. To the outside observer, there is nothing but upheaval on an unimaginable scale: revolutions, murders, war, starvation – a litany of suffering....