The slightest words define the most. Am, for instance, filling up a life, Expressing, if expression is compelled, The body’s territorial extent; Assertion’s power to concentrate A...
In the midst of a recent cold snap am off to Glasgow to speak at a dinner for the Brewers’ Benevolent Society. Super Shuttle involves free drinks but climbing in and out of buses. I tread...
‘Fear is a powerful stimulant,’ says Offred, the heroine of Margaret Atwood’s chilling tale of the near future. Trained at the Rachel and Leah Centre and habited in red, Offred...
One of the more useful side-effects of the widely-publicised troubles at the International PEN Congress held this January in New York may ironically have been the new timeliness which Norman...
The nightmare is that last straight into the camera – Dice among dice, jounced in a jouncing cup. Never any nearer, bouncing in a huddle, on the spot. Struggling all together, glued in a...
There seem to be about a hundred characters in The Recognitions, most of them United States citizens, but some of them change their names, escaping from law-men, and others have no known name at...
Peter Vansittart, novelist, historian and writer for children, has been singled out for praise by critics as diverse as Philip Toynbee, Francis King, Angus Wilson and Andrew Sinclair. All feel...
As a biology teacher at a large comprehensive school, my sister was given the job of taking the second-formers for sex education. To unblock inhibitions in the first lesson, she decided on a mild...
At the height of Empire, and of the literature of Empire, J.K. Stephen looked forward to a time When there stands a muzzled stripling, Mute, beside a muzzled bore, When...
When wrung, she’d prop the sheets and towels behind the taps. Sometimes, she’d let me try, but I couldn’t get the pressure to roll and twist into a firm packed dampness. Mine...
The fame of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza became known to the work in which they appear. In discussing itself as it goes along, the work examines the question of their fame, and in the second of...
There are many possible ways to describe Derrida’s text, none of them adequate but some less misleading than others. One can begin on safe ground, surely, by saying that Signsponge is...
The release of putting off who and where we’ve come from, then meeting in this room with no clothes on – to believe in nothing, to be nothing. Before you could reach out to touch my...
The Ecumenical Movement My first years were haunted by foreign names, phrases like ‘apostolical succession’ and strange invasions of dressed-up prelates. After a quick ordination,...
Charles Tomlinson has a poem called ‘Class’ about the Midland pronunciation of the first letter of the alphabet. In the last chapter of Some Americans, the poet tells how for a short...
Now I am about to die and the secret Of my ignorance dies with me. That I put it over them the more discerning Guessed, their eyes told me, but how much I fooled them None will ever know. My...
Roman Jakobson and Mikhail Bakhtin agree on so little as theorists of literature that they must count as alternatives. To read one and then the other, preferably Jakobson first and then Bakhtin,...
I take the following details from Current Biography, July 1976. Edgar L. Doctorow was born in New York City on 6 January 1931 to David R. and Rose Doctorow, whom he has described as...