Authors can be terrible liars, and never more so than when they are in the autobiographical vein. Like salesmen, they are at their most dangerous when most sincere. Roth’s publishers...
‘If it’s December 1941 in Casablanca,’ Humphrey Bogart moodily asks in a famous movie, ‘what time is it in New York?’ The answer is not as obvious as it looks. Time,...
Renato Serra, who died heroicaly in action on the Isonzo front in August 1915, wrote in his diary a week before that ‘war becomes like life itself. It’s all there is: not a passion...
This jar of rosy-purple jam is labelled Early Rivers, August ’82 – the date I made it, the name the farmer gave those plums, smooth as onyx eggs, but warmer. The dimpled groove,...
These are the first of Georges Perec’s wonderful and extraordinary writings to be translated into English. Perec has been a household name in France since the runaway success of his first...
It feels so much Like waking, this Rising after Forty minutes Under forty Feet of water; And to fill your Life-vest, breath by Breath, while floating Nearer a moon Mounted just high...
Father will be pompous but a good soul, Mother will have her pan and grey hair and get him out of scrapes. No he wasn’t touching up that girl, IT WAS REALLY a case of crossed wires! No he...
A Gypsy Moth holds a castle of bruised rose in its sights, the engine beating like a moth’s wings, but the moths beat against or tumble over the walls, across beams of light, on glass, and...
In November 1931, La Gazette médicale in Paris carried a curiously vehement piece on the treatment of bleeding gums. It was signed Dr Louis F. Destouches and it took issue, in a blizzard of...
Candia McWilliam’s first novel, A Case of Knives, won the Betty Trask Award last year. I expect I am wrong in persistently remembering this as a prize for something called Romantic Fiction;...
All poetry that really works has immediate vocal authority. It makes us attend. In a rather memorable and haunting poem, ‘The Masters’, Kingsley Amis stressed the point, substituting...
What fills our lives? We can’t manage without the grand abstractions of belief or love, but in the end they mostly come down to the engrossing triviality of our daily routines. What we...
Rooms My favourite lavatory was on Ischia. It was a small round tower on a flat roof, Covered with plaster, vines and happy bees. The humming might have been the sun, its rays Shuffled in by the...
What constitutes an American writer’s landscape? In Great Britain it’s common to refer to ‘Brontë country’ or ‘Hardy country’. The Lake District belongs...
This is Ciaran Carson’s second collection of poems. His first, The New Estate (1976), revealed an intricate, lyrical poet intensely aware of traditional Irish cultures, and concerned to...
For anybody interested in the history of the modern Russian theatre, particularly its visual aspects, the publication of Dr Rudnitsky’s handsomely illustrated book is an event. Based at the...
At a critical moment in The House of Mirth (1905), just after her humiliating confrontation with Gus Trenor compels Lily Bart to realise how terrifyingly ‘alone’ she is, ‘in a...
As novelists often intimate, personalities only really get their chance in novels. There they can be built up, intensified, put properly on display. In real life, they fade into uncertainty like...