Diplomatic Delicates at the piss conference. The Recovery It isn’t that the pieces are in place – The places is in pieces. d.g.pres. Salinas de Gortari or One Man’s Mexico The...
The collocation of these books suggests a moral: it is easier to write well about living authors if they annoy you than if you worship the very paper they write on. Rob Nixon is censorious and...
The last few years have been rich in Oxford Books, and I have read three of them: 18th-Century Verse and 18th-Century Women Poets, both edited with great skill and...
Pine Waking early, and riffling the pages of a book edge-on to watch the ghost pass through, thinking of the sexual opening of pine needles, the woman being absent from that opening; this is not...
Versions of the future (1). The year is 2021, human life is dying out. The last human being was born in 1996, and has just been killed outside Buenos Aires in a pub brawl. Infertility is...
A modern witch is a Witch. The upper case denotes a self-consciousness born of safer times: Witchcraft is now a minority faith to be taken seriously (at least in the States), and there is even a...
After Boccaccio buddies through dozens of scrapes and hassles, the first knight thought he was happily wed, the second man slept in a single bed. One morning, at leisure, the married man was...
Tatyana Tolstaya’s collection of short stories, On the golden Porch, published in Britain in 1989, was received with hysterical enthusiasm. Some rather silly things were said, like...
Having described a significant segment of his past in South from Granada, published in 1957, Gerald Brenan went on to write two volumes of autobiography, A Life of One’s Own (1902) and
When Sarah Orne Jewett sent her friend Henry James a copy of her latest work, a historical novel entitled The Tory Lover, he told her it would take a very long letter to ‘disembroil the...
Once upon a time, a distinguished French Department in a well-known British university set a question on Diderot in its Final Examination. Owing to a couple of unfortunate misprints, his name...
Marguerite Yourcenar was a highly honoured French writer, the first woman to be elected to the Académie Française, but her mother came from the Low Countries. The mother died in...
It is a critical commonplace, often intoned with pathos, to insist on the absolute discontinuity between what occurred in the Nazi genocide and the realm of ordinary experience. Because of that...
‘Sensibility’ was the name of a faculty before it was the name of a style. On the divide of the physical and mental, it suggested a power to receive life’s pleasures and pains,...
‘The best-known publication date in English literature,’ says Michael Mason of 1798. But the terse, intelligent Introduction to his new edition of the Lyrical Ballads seems out to...
‘In later life I have been sometimes praised, sometimes mocked, for my way of pointing out the mythical elements that seem to me to underlie our apparently ordinary lives.’ Dunstan...
When the two youngest Elliots, not yet in their teens, were sent to school at Stoer, they lodged, like the unmarried minister, near the kirk, with old Mrs Mackenzie and her daughters in a house...
1 Incline to me, MacDiarmid, out of Shetland, Stone-eyed from stone-gazing, sobered up And thrawn. Not the old vigilante Of the chimney corner, having us on, Setting us off, the drinkers’...