‘I’m so glad to hear that your son is having some success at last, Mrs Sinclair,’ said the Queen Mother. ‘We all follow his career with the greatest interest.’
Cormac McCarthy comes to us with a tremendous reputation: not only the National Book Award but a critical chorus comparing him to Melville, Shakespeare, Conrad, Faulkner, Dostoevsky. There have...
Like his near-namesake, Tristram Shandy, the unlikely hero of Peter Carey’s new novel begins the story of his life at the very beginning. While he doesn’t go into quite as much detail...
Flying Home after a visit to my mother What did she ever want but to clean house, sing like Pavarotti with a rag? New slipcovers, face at the bottom of the silver bowl. Then suddenly, the...
Blood In the market a bull’s skinned head. Horned still, with black lips. A boy is carving from the cheek, slides the slices off his palm. Green flies gather on the cuts like jewels....
Everybody knows – Paul Muldoon said it on the radio recently – that writing poetry can only get harder the more you keep at it. Against that is the belief, or perhaps the...
‘There is hardly a stanza in the long poem which is not vivid, hardly one which is not more or less odd, and the reader feels ... as if he had been riding on the rims over an endless timber...
The legend named Thomas Chatterton is less marvellous than the boy it glorified, and far less rich or strange than the cultural history that includes the history of the legend itself. Chatterton...
Born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1909, the daughter of two ‘outsider’ parents, an Ohian and a Virginian, Eudora Welty has made a life’s work of belonging. She wandered only...
One woman...
If you go any distance, you’ll no more be mine; you’ll become everybody’s playboy. Going to any body like a vulture picking at the form and flesh...
In the midst of writing his biography of Philip Larkin, Andrew Motion was contacted by a spiritualist who claimed to have been speaking to Larkin in the Beyond; later Larkin sent a posthumous word...
It is all but thirty-five years since Albert Camus was killed, when the Facel Vega sports car in which he was a passenger went off the road between Sens and Paris. Among his things was found Le...
For every booming bittern there are ten, for every cliff-stacked gannet mass there is at least one with his clingfilmed lunch-pack, wringing his socks on St Kilda. This is surety of sorts. That...
In the summer of 1913, Jacques Copeau, the French stage pioneer, who had just founded his Théâtre du Vieux Colombier in Paris, wrote to Duncan Grant asking him to prepare the costumes...
‘Watch out for that Taslima Nasreen,’ warned my Bangladeshi friends. ‘She’s going to get into big trouble one of these days.’ We were discussing the uproar over...
W.H. Auden once revealed his ‘life-long conviction that in any company I am the youngest person present.’ This confession, made when he was 58, perhaps raised a shifty smile among...
I could have left well alone; read the new autobiography and a novel or two and got stuck in. I’m not a great believer in the principle that talking to people is the best way of finding out...