The powder exploded, carrying an iron instrument through his head an inch and a fourth in circumference, and three feet and eight inches in length. Boston Post, 21 September 1848 Here is...
One evening in 1990, when I was working as a janitor in a small town under the Forth bridges, I went to see An Angel at My Table, Jane Campion’s film about her fellow New Zealander, the...
Richard Anderson, master Savile Row tailor, Opens the eleventh-floor hotel room door Wearing a new suit so blue It makes me smile, Something no suit has been able to do for quite a while. Welcome...
On Saturday 13 September 1986, Raven George, enlisted 1975,was posted to the Welsh Mountain Zoo. Conduct unsatisfactory,service therefore no longer required. George Younghusband’s The Tower...
Born, out of wedlock, in Rome in 1880 to a high-spirited, convent-educated but unconventional young aristocrat of Russian, Polish and Italian descent, the poet Apollinaire was given no fewer...
On 9 February 1968, the day before I got married to the present editor of the LRB, the head of the French Cinémathèque, Henri Langlois, was sacked – by André Malraux,...
Iris Origo wrote biographies of an Italian poet, an Italian saint, a merchant from Prato, and Byron’s Italian mistress; her bestselling book was the diary she kept of her experiences on...
‘So I have sailed the seas and come … to B … a small town fastened to a field in Indiana,’ the late, great William Gass began his imperishable short story ‘In...
Best known for his short prose sketches, the idiosyncratic Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956) liked to call himself a ‘craftsman novelist’, cobbling together ‘a long,...
after Holly Pester I never meant to see you walking out at night, boy gap among the rose-rows, my lulla my lulla my etcetera. I am a mock of atoms. Watching the bone china seethe at dusk, praying...
He watches rubbish television with Véra, he has a dream in which ‘somebody discussed “anti-Semitism in the world of waiters”,’ he has another in which Pelé shoots a football and he lunges to...
A motherless 14-year-old child, unconstrained by society and gender, is being raised by a violent father. Shunned by their community, they live far from others, sustained by hunting and...
Empath to the Punctured Kevlar Helmet World is the head inside. The jump of the optic nerve. Its Uzis are genteel. Its arbiters are deaf. Add to it the lips that are less a grin than a grave....
She has glimpsed the central truth of modern life: that sometimes it is as sublime as Homer, a sail full of wind with the sun overhead, and sometimes it is like an Ikea where all the couples are fighting.
The argument laid out in the first four poems of Some Say, Maureen McLane’s newest collection (Farrar, Straus, £20), encapsulates the one she makes in the whole book, and in all her...
What became of his face? In his memorial address Stephen Spender, who had known Auden since they were undergraduates, contrasted the young man, Nordic and brilliant, with a ‘second image...
Where would I find a hardware store in Marseille? I was on holiday fifty miles north of the city. ‘The Maison Empereur,’ my friend replied. ‘It’s an amazing...
David Wallace’s Europe: A Literary History, 1348-1418 contains 82 chapters by an enormous team of international contributors spanning what Wallace describes as nine...