Imagine a ‘movement’, not retrospectively constructed by the tidy, potty-trained minds of academics, but consciously created by its actors with a view to putting an end to the culture...
In a power-rhyming slap-happy parody of Thirties doom-mongering published in 1938 William Empson famously had ‘Just a Smack at Auden’: What was said by Marx, boys, what did he...
At Kramerbooks, Washington’s best bookstore-café, there’s a menu of ‘Primary Colors Specials’, including Lasagne di Paul Begalanese and Pork Chop George...
Early 19th-century Edinburgh had a lot less time for James Hogg than for the Ettrick Shepherd, the literary persona created partly by Hogg himself, partly by the tight circle that ran
Snow is falling along the Boulevard and its little cemeteries hugged by transmission shops and on the stone bear in the park and the WWI monument, making a crust on the soldier with his chinstrap...
At some point early in the Aids epidemic – this would have been around 1983, a time when no gay man in the United States knew when or even if he would fall ill with the complex of maladies...
The Preacher Says Regiments of the damned, halt! So, we turned to take a better look At the spread eagle on the sidewalk. There he was, hair combed over his eyes. Abominations, he called after...
Claire Clairmont was, briefly, Byron’s mistress, and the mother of his child Allegra. But was she also Shelley’s lover? Did she become pregnant by him? Did she give birth to his...
Good journalism often has a guising element in it, in which the voice of the journalist seems to come from an unexpected direction. The best journalism transcends this. But it is still true that...
In ‘Resolution and Independence’, that great but mysterious poem, Wordsworth describes himself walking out on a moist, brilliant May morning. He is about to experience one of the...
‘Are you making a trip here to write a book?’ inquires the manager as Paul Theroux books into a hotel in Corsica, 136 pages into his latest travel narrative. ‘I don’t...
No anthology offers us the full spectrum of Scottish poetry, but Roderick Watson’s comes closer than any other. This is the first big, general anthology to offer us work in Gaelic, Scots...
At college in my junior year, I had a nervous breakdown, or so I told Dr Coluccio in a long letter I typed at my desk in Eliot House. Anxious, exhausted,...
Hillary frowned impatiently. He’d go ahead with his own plans! Apricots, dates, biscuits and sardines: then he donned his three pairs of gloves. He stamped around muttering feeling his...
My great-grandfather’s watch did not confer immortality ... it was proof against age and against all those processes by which we are able to say that a man’s time runs out, but it...
If we call Shakespeare our greatest literary artist, what makes him so is the equipoise his mind always held between inner and outer worlds. The same is true of Jane Austen. What counted was not the quantity...
The point of modern theatre is not ‘to hold the mirror up to nature’ but to shock, surprise and excite. (Shakespeare was a playwright from the accident of his time: his true talents...
For years – since boyhood, really – I’ve seen myself as an above-average soccer bore. At my peak, I would happily hold forth for hours about the rugged terrace-time I’d...