For decades, Kurt Vonnegut was an unshakeable, if unconventional, part of the American literary canon: even if his books didn’t find a lot of traction in academia, they were in every...
The Flight Others look down on me. As well they might. I look down on myself from a great height: see the tramp’s straggly hair turned white – the off-white of effluent-polluted...
after Robert Aickman Your sisters flash like jewels, bright as needles. They’re threading languid reels in the ballroom. Your heart is young and taut; your heart is strung with sparkling...
The most dangerous kind of waste is the waste we do not recognise Shigeo Shingo Thank you for giving me this opportunity in the world of work I will...
Although during his lifetime F.T. Prince (1912-2003) acquired a number of illustrious admirers – including those poetic polar opposites, Geoffrey Hill and John Ashbery – his poetry...
Marilyn Butler, whose Peacock Displayed was published in 1979, wasn’t the first to connect Peacock’s name with the showy wit of his satires. It started with Shelley, his friend...
‘Never lose your sense of the superficial’ was Lord Northcliffe’s advice for tabloid journalists. It’s something Donald Trump appears to understand for himself –...
Today on two legs stood and reached to the right spot as I saw it choosing among the twisting branches and multifaceted changing shades, and greens, and shades of greens, lobed, and lashing sun,...
Cixin Liu’s monumental Three-Body Trilogy is one of the most ambitious works of science fiction ever written. The story begins during the Cultural Revolution and ends 18,906,416 years into the future.
It was just a block or two off Palisade Ave, a sprawling, second-floor living room, faux wood-panelled, stuffed chairs, big sofa, cheap ceramic Disney figurines on the coffee table, but with a...
I hope you may have an electrical absence, as life never loses its startlingness, however assailed. Emily Dickinson, letter to J.K. Chickering, autumn 1882 1. Technologies – are not...
Big families are rare now in the West – even Catholic countries in Europe aren’t exactly prolific, though Ireland holds out against the trend – but even when they were...
When male poets have dramatic, bohemian or tragic lives, it is a triumph of consistency; when they have boring ones, it is a triumph of manly compartmentalisation. The rules are different for...
There’s been a clearing in the gardens – lavish sycamores, some holly and beech, cut down in the dead of night. And from such absences, local rooks eye up the far canopies, leafy...
‘Jonathan Meades is the Jonathan Meades of our generation,’ reads a puff-quote by the late A.A. Gill on the cover of Meades’s new cookbook, The Plagiarist in the Kitchen...
MondayI realised that things had gone wrong as soon as I arrived at my hotel. The receptionists spoke no English. Only when I showed them my passport did they seem to accept, with reluctance,...
Sara Baume’s first novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither (2015), took the form of a love letter from Ray, a 57-year-old recluse, to his vicious rescue dog One Eye. Her new book, A Line Made...
I sweeps out the last speck of his glitter dust, his hippie robes, and chucked that disco mirror-ball down the cliff. All day so I spits, I cussed, watched their sail dwindle at the limit of...