Ruth and Lucille are sisters, living in Fingerbone on Fingerbone Lake. At the bottom of the lake lies their grandfather, who was guard on a train that plunged off the bridge one night, years...
When Kafka died in 1924, not one of his novels had been published. He was known to a small circle – though Janouch’s testimony shows that that circle spread beyond his friends –...
Philip Larkin’s lines have taken hold over the years, calling to them the confirmatory evidence of family histories, uniting disparate and apparently unconnected offspring under their...
Tom Arnold owes the preservation of his name to his connections. Although he ended life as an obscure don in the struggling Catholic university at Dublin, his lineage and acquaintances kept him...
Some time late in 1939, around the time World War Two began, I met Rayner Heppenstall in the street, and we went to a pub, no doubt to exchange gloomy views about our likely futures. His first...
After the success of the 14-18 European Folk Festival ‘The Festival To End All Festivals!’ The Sponsors spent over twenty years preparing for a global version. When they held the...
Start at the back: with the photograph. Traditionally, author’s vanity and publisher’s lethargy combine to make a writer look much younger than he is. Truman Capote’s portrait...
Derek Walcott is now 50 years old, but there is none of the placidity or mellowing of middle age in The Star-Apple Kingdom. If Naipaul is the great novelist of the colonial experience, Walcott...
‘And I’m not really supposed to sit down at all,’ said the young man. ‘Not on this kind of a job.’ ‘What kind is it?’ asked the girl who’d been...
Earth We’ve abandoned the garden – all those wasted hours! Only the poppies flourish. They make a virtue of scant soil, find nourishment in stones; on stems you’d think could...
A reviewer must allow for his personal reading temperament, his instinctive critical preferences and dislikes. John Banville roused my own antipathies as early as the second page of his novel:...
James Kennaway’s last book, the novella Silence, begins like this: The doctor thought: I wish I could believe her. I wish I could take her story at face value. I...
iv Not that I care who’s sleeping with whom now she’s had her womb removed, now it lies in its own glar like the last beetroot in the pickle-jar. v I would have it, were I bold,...
To K. Lumley Mother, last week I met that old Ewbank we had when I was three or four, standing outside a junk-shop in Bridge Street. I was sure it was the one because it knew me straight away. At...
Anthologies are coming from the publishers with the speed of Verey lights from a sinking ship. What could he better: six hundred pages of other men’s flowers, offering relief from what...
As I went down the loaning to the fields the wind shifting in the hedge was like an old one’s whistling speech. I knew then I was in the limbo of lost words. They had flown there from...
I first wrote a television play in 1974 because I wanted to break the isolation of writing fiction. I had no other job and I was far less reconciled than I am now to the essentially crackpot...
Early in 1923, when I was a very naive and untrained newspaper correspondent in Dublin, it was my duty to take a regular trip to Belfast and to find out what was going on politically in that...