Ecstasy and chastity. In Alphonse de Lamartine’s two most famous novels, a young man and woman seem to feel for each other what we usually think of as romantic love, but never become...
Is there an 18th-century writer to rival Oliver Goldsmith? Who else achieved lasting popular and critical success in all three major genres? The Vicar of Wakefield has never been out of print;...
Three men have come to our house in order to remove the furniture. They can carry two chairs apiece, and while one appears to spin a coffee table on his index finger, another heaves a sofa up...
Marginal illustrations depict, with faintly comic Ladybird book fidelity, the metaphorical events of the adjoining poem: Petrarch shot through the heart by an arrow; Petrarch metamorphosing into a laurel...
Obviously, sex doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it’s often a way to discuss gender and power. That point, too, is a little tired, worn out from overuse, but it persists as justification for writing about...
The bayonet tip wouldn’t bite at first. Scraped, slid off, like his vest was made of mithril. Lothlorien, Gonvilnd Keys. A gift from the Lady, or Arron Banks. Barings Bank. The plunderous...
Behind its grand and oblique title, derived rather surprisingly from Kipling, Mathias Enard’s new book is a fictional account, no more than novella length, of a visit by Michelangelo to...
Karl Ove Knausgaard talks about how much he used to dread summertime, the expectation it placed on a young man to be swimming or boating with other people. Writing solved this social awkwardness, he felt,...
An anvil takes nine days to fall from heaven to earth. Most gods bigger than most anvils. Confusing for gods to have bodies at all, a stupidity of the system. Let’s say we give up trying to bind gods...
Sarah Perry was raised a Strict Baptist, with a number of exotic beliefs – in the literal existence of the devil, the creation of the earth in six days, the sinfulness of women wearing...
after Baudelaire Like those angels with rough – rough or roughened eyes I’ll come back to the little alcove where you try to fall asleep. I’ll slip in between the sheets...
He really needed tyrants in his life, as Thomas Peacock perceptively observed. His dismal father, Sir Timothy, was the archetype, succeeded by schoolmasters, the master and fellows of University College,...
Jake Donaghue, the endlessly discomposed hero of Under the Net, is a careful composer when it comes to his narrative, as distinct from the life he has notionally been living. He refers to...
William Ewart Gladstone, four times prime minister of Great Britain and Ireland, died of a cancer of the palate on the 19th of May 1898. Ascension Day. It was fitting, Bill’s father...
For W. I have this friend who’s into sand / not like the beach / like sand you might use in construction / the economics of sand / buying and selling sand / not that he buys or sells / but...
Ten years ago, I wrote a review of an earlier book by the Spanish writer Antonio Muñoz Molina, Sepharad. The review was spiked, and I don’t have it, or the book, or much memory of...
In a sports magazine in the barbershop I found a photo of a man and woman Sitting on lawn chairs in their underwear, Smiling, like they’d cornered the market On leisure, an ad for Mexican...
Awake at 4 a.m. when the sleeping pills wear off, she finds a voice and writes the poems of her life, ones that will make her a myth like Lazarus, like Lorelei. But now she knows that her conception of...