I Rain streams from the stucco parapets of the Boomerang Academy well after midnight, early autumn, along this deserted stretch of Broadway between the railyard and boarded-up emporium where Aunt...
Prajapati was alone. He didn’t even know whether he existed or not. I too am alone. It’s fairly early in the morning. About 8.30. I am translating a book by an Italian writer called...
Now they have gone we are sunk, believe me. Their scentless oil, so volatile it only took one stray breath on its skin to set it up – it was our sole export, our currency and catholicon....
Captain Hook, ‘cadaverous and blackavised’, ‘never more sinister than when he is most polite’, lives in fear of the crocodile who ate his arm and swallowed a clock....
Why, we must dye it then – Would I like to stay here indefinitely? We have trees to prune, cryptograms to decode, it was all a blind running into the light – She couldn’t say...
Oscar wilde is one of literature’s most bankable brand-names. As the illustrations in Merlin Holland’s The Wilde Album demonstrate, this was as true in his fin de siècle as in...
Amy Clampitt died in 1994, at the age of 74; Knopf had published her first book of poems, The Kingfisher, in 1983. It was followed by What the Light Was Like (1985), Archaic Figure (1987), Westward...
‘There is a world inside the world,’ Lee Harvey Oswald repeats in Don DeLillo’s novel Libra (1988). The phrase suggests wheels within wheels, partly because Oswald is...
The condition (cancer) and the person (myself) Reeled towards each other over the years, Capsules slowly converging. Now they have docked – ‘Raped!’ the Soviet spacemen used to...
Laetitia Pilkington has been remembered chiefly as a source of information about Swift. In their happier days, she and her husband were friendly with Swift, whom it was in their interest to...
This is the 22nd volume in the series Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture. All the contributors are American, as are the General Editor, Stephen Orgel, and three out of five...
Recently I was teaching a poem by Yeats that has always reminded me of a stretched sonnet. ‘In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz’ has an octave of 20 lines and a sestet of...
I Repeat this experience wilfully. Instruct this experience to repeat itself. II With or without vicarious detail for all verities of this place. Me too. III Plenty of that already. Kikuyu grass...
With New Year (anxiety of New Years past, dread of New Years future) breathing hot down my neck, and time itself moving along so fast that it seems to be about to lap me, Oxford University Press...
So I’m moving between rooms with a tray, advertising McEwan’s, the kind we took sledging those distant snow-bright afternoons – or funereal lacquer, with peonies, or that...
Gilbert Adair the critic writes with feeling and practised bitterness about the anxiety of influence – ‘that looming, lowering pressure exerted, wilfully or not, by those who have...
English fiction since the war has been a house of good intentions. Inside it are thick theories and slender fulfilments. English novelists solemnise, in commentary about the novel, the qualities...
The voice leaves his throat like a spirit leaving a body. Words deep and English, pronouncing punctuation: comma, stop, line break. Words not in the poem, but needed. I’ve put a pound into...