If you took only the subject matter of Michael Ondaatje’s novels into account, you would expect him to be an austere and even punishing writer. He chooses the darkest material,...
Swinburne was proud of sticking to his guns. In the dedication to his collected Poems (six volumes, 1904), he declared himself a writer who ‘has nothing to regret and nothing to...
A big book is a big evil. That’s what Callimachus said, but really, what did he know? A book wasn’t a bound and folding thing for him, a codex. He could only have known...
Happiness, I consider in my papery season, did zigzag toward me until later I got hated, in the guise of that demon I was held to be. Now I forget much, in my white fog pierced by rare if...
I read the news today, oh boy, About a lucky man who made the grade. The Beatles, ‘A Day in the Life’ If you’d apologised just once for green shirts and amethyst cuff-links...
The story is waiting for us, asking us to read it, and reread it, even if it was initially supposed to disappear into the machinery of movie-making, like Harry Lime slipping off into the sewers of Vienna.
My father leaving I have found a form for my grief in the memory of a young deer I glimpsed by the side of the road half destroyed half poised to make a leap. The snow held in place its shock...
Many years ago, I had a treasured book – a history of scientific ideas – and what I liked most about it were the illustrations of various models and contraptions. Ptolemaic...
As a reader you feel you’ve earned Milkman’s more optimistic resolution, and that Anna Burns, with her wild sentences and her immense writerly discipline, has too.
Few writers have seemed less likely to produce a modern myth than Bram Stoker, not only because of the limits of his ability and imagination but because for much of his life he was furiously...
Until the mid-20th century Jane Collier was known only for a clever satire on how best to irritate people, An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1753). After her death in 1755 it was...
lie down on this floor, unnotice, try to recall, stir a little but not in heart, feel rust coming, grass going, if I had an idea this time, if I could believe in the cultivation, just piece it...
Virginia Woolf could be cruelly accurate in her assessments of people. On 24 April 1925 Robert Graves visited her unexpectedly and stayed too long. She described him as ‘a nice ingenuous...
In the early 1960s, David Hockney made a series of etchings inspired by the poems of Constantine Cavafy; he went to Egypt to discover the places Cavafy had drunk coffee and picked up lovers,...
One of my parents’ favourite Soviet films is called Autumn Marathon. Its main character, an academic translator, is living a double life. Out of divided loyalties rather than greed or...
You have burnt me too brown you must boil me again Veronica Forrest-Thomson i kept having this hunch that pleasure was a philosophy but i...
1 Once I woke up with the actual gilded horns of a cuck and you admired them and assured me I need not fear dreams that pass through the horned gates, but then I turned into a yellow cowfish,...
She started off with A and ended up at B: born in 1743 as Miss Aikin, Anna Letitia died in 1825 as Mrs Barbauld. Poet, editor, biographer, essayist, pamphleteer and children’s writer,...