Studying the West Coast of Scotland from the yacht Britannia, the Queen is said to have remarked, not long ago, that the people there didn’t seem to have much of a life. James...
Turning Point My host is a monk on a long journey from my grandfather’s coast town, exploring England like I did these last dark ages. Stopped temporarily in a shared room we meet on my...
The most striking feature of contemporary Australian writing – or so it is now claimed – is the robust health of its fiction, notably of two contrasting fictional modes: the short...
On Removing Spiderweb Like summer silk its denier but stickily, o ickilier, miffed bunny-blinder, silver tar, gesticuli-gesticular, crepe when cobbed, crap when rubbed, stretchily...
Much of the best poetry in English at least since the Romantics, is, in a controversial phrase used by Allen Curnow in the introduction to one of his two anthologies of New Zealand poetry,...
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...