‘That is the way things happen,’ Auden writes in ‘Memorial for the City’, a poem Edward Mendelson dates from June...
When Seamus Heaney left Belfast in 1972, to work as a freelance writer in the relative safety of the Republic, Northern Ireland was a war zone. Internment and Bloody Sunday had recruited so many...
When Tim Parks reviewed Salman Rushdie’s latest novel, The Ground beneath Her Feet, in the New York Review of Books he grumbled ‘that the sheer quantity of events that crowd these 575...
Reproduction of whatever you are absorbing with your five senses is forbidden, and may provoke nausea, insomnia, loss of balance or blurred vision: it were better you retire, and then attack,...
If you wanted to make your way as a literary journalist in the days of Addison you might have done well to begin by heading for Button’s coffeehouse in Russell Street where the great man...
... her once-red head locked In a tank of steam, Her face foxing down into nothing Saying ‘All my beauty’s gone,’ Holding on To...
There must exist somewhere a secret handbook for post-colonial critics, the first rule of which reads: ‘Begin by rejecting the whole notion of post-colonialism.’ It is remarkable how...
The first literary appearance of the mythical figure of Prometheus (whose name means ‘foresight’) is in the writings of Hesiod. Hesiod’s Titan is something of a trickster, of...
When Joseph Brodsky died in January 1996, there was in Russia a strong tendency to oversimplify his life, to reduce it to an outline, and at the same time to mythologise it as Pushkin’s...
Purgatory We never even felt our share of the eternal in what was our life: the moments from which these bursts of activity and lethargy are made up, the similarity between here and there in...
Modernism must be reckoned one of the lengthiest and most strenuous campaigns ever undertaken in the name of literature. Acutely conscious at once of the burden of the past – the...
Pushkin was no coward. But he was a dangerously indiscreet conspirator at the planning stages. His friends all said so and he was never taken into anyone’s confidence.
I met Vikram Seth by chance, he met me by mistake. He sat down next to me at an occasion he had never meant to attend.
‘Where the plates of different realities met, there were shudders and rifts. Chasms opened. A man could lose his life.’ This seismic imagery is, in Salman Rushdie’s The Ground beneath Her Feet, the...
Cape Y2K once safely rounded, and we shall be faced in short order by 2002, a date that stands suggestively out to the numerological eye as a palindrome. We’re allowed only one of these...
When slave girls rebel, boss ladies watch out! In literature as in life, the revenge of a female underling on a female superior can be a messy business – with limbs, eyeballs, breasts, and...
October. Windfall is thin on the ground, quickly rotten. Perhaps it’s the sick summer, or a sick tree ... My mind takes the same turns, overweight, ridiculous in trunks, arms in the air...
I’ve noticed Donny’s bridal gownshop’s lights are only on, in winter, Saturday nights. Though window shopping for white wedding gear ’s not done this coldest, darkest time...