At independence from Belgium in June 1960, Patrice Lumumba, the Congo’s first prime minister, inherited a territory the size of India with only 12 African university graduates and no...
House on a Red Cliff There is no mirror in Mirissa the sea is in the leaves the waves are in the palms old languages in the arms of the casuarina pineparampara parampara, from generation to...
The impatience for summer is desire: ritual, imbedded hard as a hinge in the earth’s mesh. From the papery bulb, the spurred, flesh-green horn pushes, straining for air; flexes its...
Morvern Callar, the narrator of Alan Warner’s Morvern Callar (1995) and These Demented Lands (1997), reacts to the suicide of her boyfriend by lighting a Silk Cut, opening her Christmas...
Jean-Nicolas-Arthur Rimbaud, poet and ex-poet, took a 41 shoe – about a seven and a half in British sizes, an American eight. We have his own word on this, in a letter written shortly...
Queenie said, ‘Maybe you better stop calling me that,’ and I said, ‘What?’ ‘Stan doesn’t like it,’ she said. ‘Queenie.’ It was a worse...
They stand here in a shocked silence, these grouped bodies in cold dresses, their eyes downcast; the hands quietly gesture from this flaking grotto of wishes. But something flares in a corner...
Shena Mackay’s latest novel invites you to observe the Zeitgeist of 1997 addling the brains and hearts of quite a large number of Londoners. They seem an incongruous lot, but with her usual...
From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity. Edvard Munch I Landfill In ways the dead are laid...
‘Soul of the age!’ exclaimed Ben Jonson in the prefatory pages of the First Folio (1616), ‘The applause, delight, the wonder of our stage!’ His climactic description was...
‘To write but avoid becoming a “writer”. This feeling against is insistent and true,’ wrote Murray Bail in a diary in London in 1971. Usually it’s the other way...
For the first time since Mary Butts died more than sixty years ago, all her major work is available in Britain, together with a first, full-length biography by Nathalie Blondel. Their appearance...
Tristan Corbière’s only book, Les Amours jaunes, has been lost and found and lost again, ignored and praised, forgotten and rediscovered, in happy rotation, ever since it first...
Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel is a spoiled gift which, as an ugly baby makes us search for deficiencies in its attractive parents, forces us to reconsider its creator’s talents. That...
Ingerlund The fat boy by Buddha out of Boadicea with the pebbledash acne and half-timbered haircut, sitting on the pavement with his boots in the gutter – we must have made his day when we...
Toys The janitor washing the blackboard in Mrs Turnaud’s class February night not too far from the border with Vermont snowless, and still a little stoned thinks he caught a patch of aurora...
On 15 August 1915, a band of 25 men, among them the leading citizens of Marietta, Georgia, kidnapped Leo Frank from the Milledgeville Prison Farm, tied a rope around his neck and lynched him....
Some writers are as interesting to read about as to read: writers such as Byron, Wilde, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and D.H. Lawrence, who saw their lives as extensions of their art and in many cases...