Sunday October 26, 1986 How do these things become us? – orange juice as we cast off, fudge as we meet the ocean funnelling into the inlet of Cape May, then boiled chestnuts, grey and...
The leading lights of Bulacan – The bruisers and the dreamers – Are politicians to a man. Their names go on the streamers. But if their chief’s an also-ran The dreamers and the...
I dreamt I was the simple trusting boy who took his wicked teacher’s jealous hand and climbed the mountain. And the teacher said he had to go away, but he’d be back, and if I happened...
It’s a characteristic of all Sybille Bedford’s fiction to tell the reader less than he wants to know. Ivy Compton-Burnett was a friend of hers and perhaps gave her lessons in leaving...
There is a terrible irony here. Had Lorca, in his panic of the days leading up to the Civil War, chosen to go almost anywhere but home to his parents in Granada, where the hatred against him was the greatest...
How clever of Nature to ‘choose’ Darwin to teach the world that she has, against the prevailing view of natural theology, no purpose, no teleology, no choice. No one could be more...
What do the lives and thoughts of other people feel like? We’ll never really know, but fiction offers as good an approximation of knowing as we’re likely to come across. That...
Scottish nationhood never quite dies but hibernates, latent in all those millions of people and thousands of texts, ready to be potentiated by various events, some more accountable or predictable...
Ghosts with lightning eyes, peeled Aboriginal corpses Gather insects through imported gloaming Catechised in Auld Kirk Gaelic. After Culloden this land was possessed, Settled in a trance of cash....
Ocosingo The crazy zocalo tips at a loco angle. It pours three hundred infant girls, dressed like Christmas tree fairies, down the church’s throat, singing. A thin trickle of demonstrators...
It is the Pope, the veritable white Polish Pope, The Pope who has been a poet, the published Pope, He who kisses the soil, and accordingly Worships a Black Virgin, now like a Christ-child He has...
In the 1760s the greatest gap in Western knowledge of the world – the Pacific – was plugged, in theory, by the great southern continent of Terra Australis, awaiting its Columbus....
In 1894, the same year that the Children’s Charter extended new legal protection to the young, the English painter Thomas Gotch portrayed his young daughter in majesty like a Madonna by...
I am just back at my home in Brittany after a week’s moving round Britain doing talks and readings on the occasion of my return to English-language publishing after twenty years’...
There is a cartoon by Beerbohm somewhere showing a distended G.K. Chesterton banging the table with his fist and saying he’d ‘had enough of all this bloody nonsense’. It seems...
About a century ago Henry James remarked sadly that, unlike the French, the English novel was not discutable. It had no theory behind it. Its practitioners were largely unaware that ‘there...
Robert McLiam Wilson was born in 1964, which means that Ripley Bogle, his first novel, was written in his early twenties. The novel’s qualities are those of immodest youth: it is ambitious,...
‘Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist.’ This quotation is taken from ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’, a lecture delivered by the...