Normal People doesn’t bear much resemblance to apprentice work. The evenness of Rooney’s attention is a huge asset, page by page, and the sign of an unusual sensibility.
A girl who slept in a truck tyre and walked a year of miles was driven back down through dry forests on a small-eyed bus with drooping heads – to no rooms for a child, but the murderers...
I saw a great performance of Hamlet this spring, at Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine, in a Soviet-era theatre built on a similar brutalist scale to the National in London but with less...
Pictures A picture book of Churches makes clear that the one Stone for the floor is A broken Peter. Overhead vacuity Lifts up the great dome. Pecunia non olet Vespasian taxed Sewage,...
The long poem pre-empts its own significance. We expect more of it and less of ourselves, adjusting our pace and investing in the big picture. Hannah Sullivan’s majestic debut offers...
It wasn’t meant to be like this. If we were destined to push the envelope surely it was by flying a recovered Avro Arrow above the speed of sound? The most we were meant to condemn was the...
At the New Yorker, with her ‘longshoreman’s mouth’ and ‘tongue that could clip a hedge’, Maeve Brennan made her opinions known. Daphne du Maurier was ‘witless’, Jean Stafford a ‘bête...
Empty air is a distraction cut out of another void...
Gunn is fascinated by the idea of unknowing, the moment when clarity becomes open to a space beyond clarity, whether drug-induced or part of a dream.
With this New Greasiness One of them breaks the routine at the office usually – mouths off or is sullen, every once in a while. The man said, ‘You know why I’m here,...
Does sleep count as doing something? Can that trite phrase ‘rest and relaxation’ communicate something true?
After the rain stops you can hear the rained-on. You hear oscillation, outflowing, slips. The tipping-down of the branches, the down, the exact weight of those drops that fell over the days and...
Having reached the grand age of 14, Elizabeth Barrett peered back into the distant past. She recorded in her journal that, when she was nine, ‘works of imagination only afforded me...
Robin Robertson is something of a specialist in pain. He usually describes what painful events look like from the outside rather than how they feel from within. It’s often as though...
Old Mexico They can’t get enough of the indecent toy skeletons in copulo every which way, the perpetual action heroes, the cast-off clothes with writing on them, the mufla and
After the olivine waves of Marina di Torre del Lago, we drive between colonnades of umbrella pines … It is 7:30 p.m. and the midsummer sun has just descended below the treeline …...
On a recent episode of an Irish talk show, a guest celebrated her 90th birthday accompanied by her 19 children. The children, now mostly in their fifties and sixties, occupied the whole front...
The work of making parchment is unglamorous, and sometimes it smells like the inside of a boxing glove: like cheese and sweat and hard work. There is only one firm of parchment makers left in...