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...
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...