I want to suggest that far from the baroque disorder and excess of that ‘magic realism’ with which he is so often taxed, the movement of García Márquez’s paragraphs and the unfolding contents...
The world is packed with scaffolding and empty packing-crates Where this train terminates The humid air is poorly when the clouds are working nights Moths crowd the windows dreaming hard of...
Roland Barthes met Valéry Giscard d’Estaing on 9 December 1976 at a lunch hosted by Edgar Faure, the president of the National Assembly, at the Hôtel de Lassay. Michel...
At the start of Aeschylus’ Oresteia a watchman sees a flaming beacon. This is supposed to be the sign that Troy has fallen and that Agamemnon is coming home from the Trojan war. The...
In Roald Dahl’s ‘The Swan’, two boys hack up a bird and tie her wings to a third boy’s shoulders. Then they try to make him fly. The boy escapes up a willow tree, but...
Some actors fear if they play Sherlock Holmes for a very long run the character will steal their soul, leave no corner for the original inhabitant. Jeremy Brett See how it glints and sparkles!...
Soliloquy of the Inner Emigré The authorities asked us to call at noon, to test their new helpline. No one was available to answer our questions. I kept the line open just in case, held...
The Election They promised us free lunch And all we got Edna Is wind and rain And these broken umbrellas To wield angrily At cars and buses Eager to run us over As we struggle to cross the...
Crail Spring Surprised on returning to find the flat flooded with light. Merciless, evaporative, even when overcast, and, as the solstice neared, sanctimonious in its imperative to...
These eight stories, by the author of last year’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Sympathiser, are clear-eyed and effective, uniform in length, evenly pitched in tone. Viet Thanh...
In the course of her earlier career as a journalist and columnist, Cooper created and perfected a characteristic style that could be descriptively precise, insightful, witty, and quite cutting when she...
The Letter He stooped to assess The scrap of paper drenched with Rain and dried by wind, An ending: ‘One can Love anything, so how much Better it was you.’ Vacation While they...
Beauty is a fight to the finish, though you want to educate the decorum away. Here, in the bruised atmosphere of a tropical storm, we wait for the rain band to diminish, considering horses....
Sex never so much as occurs to Valjean, or indeed to those who adore him – this while Valjean’s creator was enjoying the charms of every chambermaid he could lay his hands on.
The other day I heard someone summarise the plot of Tim Parks’s new novel. The synopsis went something like this: ‘It’s about a middle-aged writer, whose life is...
On Saturday, 6 March 1926, the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre at Stratford-on-Avon was closed. But around 11 a.m. a girl called Eileen White noticed ‘an awful lot of smoke’ pouring...
‘There is something very Far Eastern about this,’ William Empson says in Some Versions of Pastoral, meaning the manner of Marvell’s poem ‘The Garden’. The remark...
Sighs & groans. As it crawls to a standstill the train becomes a fortress. Outside: pitiless silence. Emptied sky. Snowbound farms. Ever-deepening blue. The vulnerable economies of owl...