Leaping around in a warehouse to the rhythms of repetitive beats and thumping basslines is a simple pleasure, though not, of course, to everyone’s taste. At the same time it is a...
For my mother Lie down beside me As you had to once in a West of Ireland cottage The night the fetch from Newfoundland flipped the storm-window And the sea went mad at the sight of itself. Spray...
I see small coaches passing between the trees. I try to catch them with one hand, but they continually slip away to the sound of young women giggling from the pleasure they take in riding about....
To accuse the book of Genesis of being patriarchal is like complaining that cats throw up fur-balls, or dogs sniff each other’s bottoms. It’s not pleasant, but that’s cats and...
The grey-green snake of the Grand Canal heels itself behind a fleet of hulls and white marble writes white marble on the face of the water under the façades in a fat oily squiggle straight...
It is rare these days for a book or story to get talked about without the attendant behind-the-scenes efforts of publicists, and the notice of reviewers, and the author making appearances on...
It was the evictions that created the Effie Bawn people still remember. She was never political before that. She had never listened to politicians. She had only listened to saints. But the Rent...
Joe Orton came 16th this year in the National Theatre’s poll of the hundred top playwrights of the century. Not bad for someone who failed the 11-plus, spent six months in prison, and was...
Was the creator of Figaro on the side of the angels or simply president of Beaumarchais Enterprises? In his lifetime, he was an upstart in the eyes of the great and the good, and governments...
‘There is nothing new to be said ... but the old is better than any novelty. It would be a sad day indeed when there should be something new to say.’ Henry James’s fear that...
But arrive like this: a sudden shadow on the washed-out fleur-de-lis that paper the breakfast room; a form half-hidden by some other form, the angle of a door, perhaps, unless I think to make it...
Coolness at evening, a delicate astringent It seems only last week those sunsets, like gardens of sky in all their extravagance, kept on without end, the lightest of breezes, trembling sage. Now,...
In the mid-August silly season, excitement for bored hacks was provided by a rumour of mysterious origin, about a London bus driver who had received a fortune – the statutory ‘cool...
There are all kinds of things to do with books apart from reading them, and one of the most pleasurable is to dream of reading them. Many of us keep scribbled or notional lists of such dreams,...
A young man, hectic and dirty, sits on a park bench in a cold city. He is wild, nervous, seems to fiddle with his soul. Beside him, an old man is holding a newspaper. The young man begins a...
Old Tunnockians The ritual of the taxi ride to my uncle’s funeral, its names Leuchars, Pitlessie, Blairgowrie, Kippen, Balfron. Passing a village shop whose window reads YOU CAN’T TOP...
The first of the great Indian novelists to write in English, R.K. Narayan, wrote modest novels about modest people living in the small South Indian town of Malgudi. The completeness of the world...
For all its glories, the postwar British theatre has driven an embarrassing number of its brightest stars into exile. Conventional wisdom attributes this to a combination of parsimony and...