‘In all my dealings with the Moors, I have always discover’d in them an ill-natur’d cowardise, which makes them insupportably insolent, if you shew them the least respect, and...
The anthologist’s job is or ought to be a happy one. Less so the reviewer’s, especially if the reviewer is himself or herself an anthologist, and sick and tired of the standard ploys....
Seeing things, Seamus Heaney’s ninth volume of new poems, is aimed squarely at transcendence. The title has a humble and practical William Carlos Williams ring to it, but that is...
The American press is waging a campaign against American universities, assisted by a barrage of muckraking books. It would be naive or dishonest to claim that there are no follies or crying...
The first page of Jeremy Reed’s ‘autobiographical exploration of sexuality’ finds him with ‘a red gash of lipstick’ on his mouth, pondering whether to take the ten...
I was waiting outside my local 24hr Photoprint Services, all unsuspecting of the fate shuffling towards me on the mini-lab auto-printer. I was flicking through the usual haul of barely...
From the roof of her under-reef den a giant Pacific octopus – whose suckered legs are metres long, who changes tone when curious from glowing white to glorious red – hangs a hundred...
All day I have wiped paste inks From auxiliary rollers, ink ducts, Rubber stamps and the work top. Dabbing My fingers in trichloroethane. The cleaning solution is clear as water And smells like...
Julian Barnes is a writer of rare intelligence. He catches the detail of contemporary life with an uncanny, forensic skill. His style is a model of cool and precision. He is often very funny, and...
What Carlyle called the Condition of England Question – in our day, the country created by Thatcher and her sub-lieutenants – is surely the ripest subject on offer to novelists. The...
‘European literature,’ wrote David Dabydeen in his essay ‘On not being Milton: Nigger Talk in England Today’, ‘is littered with blacks like Man Friday, who falls to...
Seeing things Late afternoon on the prairie. We were looking for birds. My old friend Michael was amazed at what we said we saw: such far-off dots, how could we pick them out? still less remark,...
During the 18th and 19th centuries verse surrendered its longer discursive and narrative forms to prose and confined itself more and more to the short lyric and the sequence of short lyrics. Much...
Amy Tan was born in San Francisco soon after her parents emigrated from Communist China. A few years ago she joined a Writers’ Circle, which told her, as Writers’ Circles always do,...
‘I was always surprised and truly amazed that anyone could be attracted by the macabre,’ Dennis Nilsen, the biggest multiple killer in British criminal history, has remarked. He went...
We all know the story. A brilliant, neurotic young American woman poet, studying on a fellowship at Cambridge, meets and marries the ‘black marauder’ who is the male poet-muse of her...
The Feminist Companion to Literature in English is itself the product of impressive feminist companionship. Listed in the preamble are three editors, four consulting editors, 12 contributing...
‘Of the four Queens of Crime who dominated the 1930s – Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy L. Sayers – Ngaio Marsh reigns supreme for excellence of style...