It is probably best not to take advice direct and unfiltered from the animal kingdom – but lemurs are, I think, an exception. They live in matriarchal troops, with an alpha female at...
Scott Fitzgerald spent his declining years in ‘a hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement’. Hollywood, he...
parched, on tight, questioned, invisible, full of so much evolution, now the moment is gone, begin again, my skin, here, my limit of the visible me, I touch it now, is spirit-filled,...
Cahows have a strange wailing mating cry that was once thought by mariners to be the sound of devils. William Strachey writes that the cahows (then called ‘sea owles’), clumsy on land and almost blind...
I was not born here. But it’s here that we feel safe. Above the near- ly clear perpendicular rafters, each split sunbeam apportions its angles over the bald spots, scarves, bedazzled...
Although gamma is the third letter of the ancient Greek alphabet, the fourth book of Aristotle’s Metaphysics is called Metaphysics Gamma because there are two extant Metaphysics Alphas and...
It is no surprise that Irish studies has become something of a heavy industry in academia. Ireland is a small nation – ‘an afterthought of Europe’, as James Joyce put it...
‘We had seen bare land/And the people bare on it’: two lines from a retrospective poem by George Oppen that appeared in 1963 in a small magazine published out of New Rochelle, the...
i In the midst of this lifelike grief I am stood at the cutlery drawer, and keep on standing here as if I might remember what I came in for, but then I think of something else, and head...
In chronological order, starting with her debut, Sleepwalking, which she wrote as a student at Brown and published in 1982 when she was 23, the page counts of Meg Wolitzer’s novels are:...
There is something generational about the recent revival of interest in the novelist Ann Quin. After scarcely even maintaining a cult reputation among writers in the years since her death,...
my sex enter breakfast truck, the bluebottles performing obsequies to marbled bacon enter girl with manacles. enter so damn adorable. he likes small fuckdoll. girl who looks plaintively at...
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,...