‘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...
A rich old American in John Banville’s new novel makes an amused distinction between money and small change. Asked what money is, he just laughs. This is not malevolent laughter but...
My children are now 21 and beyond the age of being reasoned with or read to. This has its advantages: reasoning has never come naturally to me. But I profoundly miss reading to them as they...
The crew come from all over, because the money is that good. Women, men – many are students planting as a summer job,...
The posthumous progress in English of the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) is marked by deaths: those of his majoritarian and minoritarian translators David McLintock and Ewald Osers,...
If you’re 18, without any experience of your chosen branch of higher education, your best hope of advancement – of learning to think like your elders – is to listen to your...
Poetry from New Zealand right now often reflects the nation’s sense of itself: friendly and co-operative, gently ironic, quiet or reserved. This style has something to do with population...