Anyone who has ever had to chaperone a demanding Man of Genius will recognise something of Jay Parini’s plight. Parini had to be Borges’s guide, driver, listener, eyes, protector, interlocutor,...
In ‘Ignorance’ Rose Macaulay meditates on that ‘real delight in cruelty, such as Nero’s, or Caligula’s, or the Nazis’, which she ‘simply cannot begin to understand’....
There is no world-transforming event that severs past from present; no survivors charged with finding a safe haven or with the daunting responsibility of rebuilding civilisation from the rubble; no prelapsarian...
Because in 1960s Harlem the odds were stacked so heavily against Black people, even if you weren’t a criminal yourself you risked being found guilty by association, or dragged down by those around...
Tom Stoppard has talked of putting on Englishness ‘like a coat’ when he arrived as an eight-year-old. A more sentimental biographer might have colluded in the suggestion that the coat could...
My father told me to return to my birthplace,the cave of Amnisos, and wait for a woman,that she would need me. I knew what that meant –he’d impregnated another mortal whore.I returned...
Quite apart from the fact that the text of Catullus is a conjectural amender’s paradise, with lacunae and all kinds of textual S&M to be performed on it for the pleasure, or possibly the pain,...
It seems, in the end, that an obsession with words, their proper order and their etymologies, is nothing less than a search for proof that time existed.
The CIA equipped and paid Central American rebels, and hired US mercenaries to fly bombers over Guatemala City, dropping first leaflets then bombs, while the US navy blockaded the coast. The coup could...
In the summer of 1849, Arthur Hugh Clough went to dinner with the writer Jane Octavia Brookfield. ‘I tried to talk with him, but he has the most peculiar manner I almost ever saw,’...
Last Poemi.m. Derek MahonWe value them, the voicesthat need us least, who speakwith honest subtletyto ironies beyond us,who slip our grasp and gowhistling down endlesscelestial colonnadesof...
The Londoners of Keith Ridgway’s A Shock, who live in a part of the city roughly bounded by Brixton, Camberwell and Peckham, suffer from a condition familiar to inhabitants of mighty,...
Are weextinct yet. Who ownsthe map. May Ilook. Where is myclaim. Is my historyverifiable. Have Iincluded the memoryof the animals. The animals’memories. Are theystill here. Are wealone....
I am haunted by the figure of Rolanda Polonsky, walking through the hospital corridors. If my eight-year-old self had opened the doors that frightened me I might have found her, back then, exactly as...
The narrator of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s pair of novels, The Sympathiser (2015) and The Committed, is one of the more irresistible characters in recent American fiction. He smokes, he drinks,...
It’s characteristic of the perverse workings of the novel that Damon Galgut should insist on providing a trivial continuity immediately after he has erased a necessary one. If the domestic...
My brother’s words when I hear them these days seem not to go into my ears – but down some other deeper artery. He said, ‘It’s mother’s house and I just think of it...
all daypersonifying plantsEvil NettleFascist Weedboing boingI do not want youmatter out of placeI rip you outI favour the desiredthe useful to me to me to me!meanwhile stars doing themselvesin the...