In Canto Four of Camões’s 16th-century epic, as Vasco da Gama and the men of his fleet prepare to embark on their conquest of the Golden East, ‘an old man of venerable...
Sonny Liston didn’t really have any friends. Not, at least, among the reporters covering his heavyweight title fight with Floyd Patterson in 1962. Intimidated by Listen’s criminal...
We know you’ve got a thing about us, scuffing the earth at our feet, giving us a voice. Like this. We know about the groans we’ve heard, the yelps in moonlight, rumours of progeny....
Post-Modernism entered the public mind as a fast-value currency in the late Seventies and early Eighties, in the field of architecture, where its association with gimmicky tropes of visual play...
Birch Tree with Chainsaw for Pia Five months; five cords of hardwood; ash mostly, hickory, oak; greying in the weather, by April starting to rot, outsides sodden by May, too crumbly even to...
Some time ago, Philip Roth remarked that his novels investigate ‘people in trouble’. Though much about his work has changed over the years, his fictional landscapes are still littered...
It seems so long ago – tell me, did you bring your family to our marriage of convenience and regret? I remember your hearty cousins fresh from the Home Counties, so pleased with their good...
‘Not everyone can be Whitman,’ Borges said in an interview in London long ago. He paused, pretending to reflect. ‘Not even Whitman could be Whitman.’ We knew Borges was...
Smile at that tiny poem and it will sparkle back at you. It is a novel the size of an egg-cup. The first in a sequence of individually numbered ‘Gaelic Stories’, its strength lies in...
for D.W. I can see the smudge of light colours Spreading and drying quickly in the sun. The pulpy paper takes the water colour well, And this landscape, this cliché of sea And a fresh...
That John Updike has a Trollopian fidelity to his characters is evident from the four books of the Rabbit series; this new book is the third of a sequence about the New York Jewish novelist Henry...
In 1964 Basil Bunting began writing his long poem Briggflatts on the train from Wylam to Newcastle, where he was in charge of the financial page of the Newcastle Evening Chronicle. In June that...
Macaboy is at his workbench, and in the flow of his rituals he might be a priest at an altar, except that he hasn’t a stitch of clothing on. There is an early June heatwave. His skin...
The writer in France is having a good winter, whose autumn novel is no sooner out than it is being roundly abused on all sides for its dubious attitudes, and is then passed over by the jurors of...
In his essay ‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition’, Borges wrote that the Argentine writer, and the South American writer, by virtue of being distant and close at the same time, had...
The traditional view of mid-17th-century verse is that it consists of ‘mere anthology pieces’. As a statement of fact this has a ghost of truth to it, since much of the verse from...
When Cecil Day Lewis was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968, he got – within days of the good news – a letter from his bank manager. ‘The whole Midland,’ it said,...
Like every writer before him who has ever scored a triumph ... Fallow was willing to give no credit to luck. Would he have any trouble repeating his triumph in a city he knew nothing about, in a...