Self-respecting guys don’t read Westerns. In fact, unless you look carefully, no one seems to read them. The cowboy novel rates lower even than pornography in the scale of cultural...
‘Snow-balls have flown their Arcs, starr’d the Sides of Outbuildings, as of Cousins, carried Hats away into the brisk Wind off Delaware’ – that’s what it says right...
For R.S. Thomas, the poetry of R.S. Thomas has never been able to shape up to requirements, could never quite be work that he might publicly take pride in. After all, it is ‘in English’, and Thomas...
Five years ago the formidable chairwoman of the first Russian Booker Prize remarked of one of the entries that she’d never been so disgusted in her life. There was an American judge on the...
Rear-vision glass knows what comes up out of whatever concealed exit I’ve left behind me. These cross-country highways hide little for long,...
That Iain Sinclair, poet, essayist, impresario and weaver of arcane fictions, is one of the more generous spirits around is obvious from this brave, demanding and often flummoxing anthology....
‘I’ll just explain the central situation. Six people are trapped in a lift between two floors of a skyscraper – a musician, a surgeon, a charwoman, a conjuror and his female...
Most readers, it seems, are willing and able to construct complete narratives from even the tiniest snippets of information, whether in the form of lazily written genre fiction or in the artful...
‘Tell me, where does fancy breed?’ In the calyx of the crocus in the springtime, a merry time when the spirit bounds like a feather. And a goatherd, two miles out of Oaxaca, with his...
Private Wing in July Night with its epileptic dreams Is over, and for once there seems To be some flavour in the day. Outside my room – my territory Where the seasons do not enter –...
He knew not what to do – something, he felt, must be done – he rose, drew his writing-desk before him – sate down, took the pen – – found that he knew not what to...
Archimedes thought that he could move the world if only he could get outside of it, and the same idea inspires writers in the transcendental genre of fiction. Find some place sufficiently far out...
Here, with the cloud of a six-figure advance trailing behind her, comes Arundhati Roy: May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows...
In the memoirs, autobiographies and biographies of those who were central to the development of Modernism, Mina Loy turns up with a Zelig-like ubiquity. She studied art in Munich at the same time...
This is not the point, but you had only to look at your soft red atlas to have it fall open where years ago you had written PERSIA for some reason, AFGANISTAN and KASHMIR, adrift in your...
On the morning of 16 June, in city after city throughout the world, small groups of people will gather to engage in curious rituals. In New York, some fifty people will each pay $25 to breakfast...
In the early Eighties, British novelists worried a lot about history. Where had it gone, why had it left so few traces, why did it still hurt? How could it simultaneously seem so irrelevant and...
This ought to be a good novel, for it is by a good writer and deals intelligently with a bit of British history that continues to interest us. And it certainly gives pleasure; so it seems a shade...