Pusher Angelus of mercy, Al was the Pope walking through the squalor of an unfeeling world – yes, sometimes, numbed by his stuff, he floated among the giddy children bestowing vials of...
To a person inquiring about his life, Emerson wrote: ‘I have no history, no fortunes that would make the smallest figure in a narrative. My course of life has been so routinary, that the...
There is something about a millennium, something about the clicking-over of zeros on the odometer of history that sends a frowsy doomsday swell welling up from under. Good round numbers beget...
Tim Winton’s new novel is full of shit. There are references to it every three or four pages, almost: characters are forever feeling like it, or smelling of it, or coming out with it, or at...
Like most biographies nowadays, David Nokes’s John Gay is very long, but unlike some of the others it is not much longer than it needed to be. Gay devoted so much of his attention to people...
The soppressata fée outside of Califano’s with the swept back ’do and blood on her smock grabs a quick smoke on the sidewalk, tosses it in the gutter then sucks back her lips...
I first came across Christopher Logue’s ‘account’ of the Iliad in 1975 at Oxford where I went to hear a vigorous reading by two young men of Patrocleia, his version of Book XVI....
Clearly, for Martin Amis, enough is nothing like enough. To read him is to discover an author as voracious as his characters: like Terry in Success, who specifies that ‘I want all that and...
Kate Gray (1975-1991) I start up a conversation with occasional Kate. Too late, too late, but with a big sigh she appears in the sky. I tell her the home doesn’t forget – her...
Was it Randall Jarrell who defined a novel as a long piece of prose fiction with something wrong with it? By that yardstick, Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard is a novel thousands of times over....
Over the course of his story, Rob learns, very sensibly, to give up on looking for the meaning of life in a Pretenders record, though he still allows himself the freedom to enjoy the music. Which is to...
The Expert An old girlfriend appears on TV answering questions about the homeless. Yes, the new government initiative is welcome as far as it goes. No, it doesn’t even attempt to tackle the...
The title of Benstock’s biography of Edith Wharton is somewhat mal à propos. Edith Wharton, other reviewers have pointed out, had plenty of gifts from chance. She was born, in 1862,...
After Pierre Bonnard The woman’s cupboard, she’s stocked with jellies, chutneys, pickled limes and bottles of blue-skinned plums that just to look at is to taste their sweet green...
‘Le lesserez la, le povre Villon?’ – Will you leave poor Villon here? – the poet asks in an appeal from Meung-sur-Loire, near Orléans, where he was detained at the...
Of all the pills presented to the incredulous common reader by Continental philosophy and literary theory over the past generation, the well publicised ‘death of the subject’ was...
I don’t believe this country has a better writer to offer than James Buchan. I can’t think of anyone who concedes so much of his own intelligence to his protagonists –...
‘Fame is difficult for a writer to deal with,’ Thom Gunn writes in his essay on Allen Ginsberg’s poetry. ‘It dries you up, or it makes you think you are infallible, or...