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...
Most good novelists make life seem more interesting than it is. The very fact that their work offers a continuous aesthetic or psychic frisson is a kind of falsehood, a betrayal of reality; and...
Call it the Zeitgeist, call it the return of the repressed, but personal memoir, intellectual autobiography, or the mixture of literary and confessional writing defined by Nancy Miller as...
Like many people who came to New York City in the high-flying years of the early 20th century, Kenneth Burke approached the city as a work of art. ‘I cannot express it, it is too...
The RamHalf-dead, hit by a car, the whole of its forma jiggle of nerves, like a fish on a lawn.To help finish it off, he asked me to standon its throat, as a friend might ask a friendto hold, with...
The French Writer Raymond Roussel was 56 years old when he left Paris for Sicily in the early summer of 1933. It seems clear he had no intention of ever returning to France. His theatrical...
Minus Ten The snow is blameless. It falls like someone who cannot stop talking, in querulous drifts. It covers the same ground we barely remember, collects evidence wherever we slip. Thaw turns...
On 9 January, shortly after eleven on a dark sleety morning, I saw my dead father on a train pulling out of Clapham Junction, bound for Waterloo. I glanced away, not recognising him at once. We...
I wonder how many culture-pilgrims have journeyed to Martinique since Texaco won the Prix Goncourt in 1992, to see whether a shanty town of that name really exists. The novel may be a lush...
The authorities are always interested in the assassin’s bookshelf. The Israeli police were quick to release the fact that Yigal Amir had a copy of The Day of the Jackal. Before Theodore...
Sometime in the early sixties, when I was eight or nine, the actor Micheál MacLiammóir came to Enniscorthy, a small town in the south-east of Ireland where we lived, to perform his...
This long novel is haunted, dedicated to the dead, but quite without nostalgia, almost without grief. It starts with an intimate loss (‘I’m beginning this book on All Saints’...
Anti-feminist women puzzle and infuriate their feminist sisters. How can a capable and rational woman persuade herself to oppose a cause from which she has gained so much? Is it self-hatred, or...
Twenty years ago, when Maureen Duffy first published The Passionate Shepherdess: Aphra Behn, 1640-89, Behn was still known principally as the celebrated but largely unread founder of...
For Don and Chris who asked me to check the genitive of clitoris not in Greek, which is easy, but Latin. I’m trying standard dictionaries in three languages for that sleek particular satin-...