Lucia Perillo, who died on 16 October, was a poet who liked jokes. That’s not unusual in itself, but she also wrote on topics that may disgust you, or ones that you may think funny...
What aileth thee now, that thou art wholly gone up to the housetops? – Isaiah 22:1 I (gulp) had to have a certain operation, and as I went under, found myself assailed by a flock of...
Any life of A.E. Housman is an assemblage of the already known and the well documented. Housman’s stage-management of his reputation was as controlled as his quatrains.
The rapturous, impossibly short-lived post-raciality of the first black presidency has been usurped by a backward-looking social consciousness best expressed by the internet neologism ‘wokeness’.
Ripping off and riffing off are related but distinct activities. A jazz player takes a standard and turns it inside out and back to front and then, to a cheer, makes it reassemble out of the...
Dying, Dad wanted sunscreen. Nonstop. Frantic if withheld. Would sayscreen, and we just did it. Knew he was dying. Was angry. In last weeks wore red sleepmask over eyes day and night. Would ride...
For a long time Anthony Trollope was remembered as the civil servant who introduced the pillar box to Britain and wrote fiction in three-hour stints before breakfast, sitting in front of a...
Romanticism bequeathed a good many things to the beleaguered modern imagination, one of the most provoking of which was the thought that it should get out more. That bit of advice proved all...
Endless heritage beneath the heavenly soundshed. Jet-black amphiboles. Ten varieties of scones in Elie. Giant centipedes and petrified tree stumps of the Devonian fossil record. Pyrope garnets at...
‘Growing detachment from the world is of course the experience of many writers as they grow older, grow cooler or colder,’ JC, the authorial surrogate in J.M. Coetzee’s Diary...
Everyone’s younger sibling was still in a stroller, learning to drink from a cup or put on a dress. Everyone’s mom was overseeing additions to our beige, orange and air-conditioned...
When the American journal n+1 was launched in 2004, an editorial in the first number lamented the state of contemporary culture. We are living, it said, at ‘a time when serious writing...
There are many ‘nice’ things in Claire-Louise Bennett’s fiction. The narrator – she seems to be the same person in all twenty stories – is hardly up in the...
‘He affects the Metaphysics,’ Dryden wrote of John Donne, ‘not only in his satires, but in his Amorous Verses, where Nature alone should reign; and perplexes the Minds of the...
Her sudden, silent prayer was commonplace: to betray but do no harm, to admix guilt with love and that way get the best of it, to let each salty lie roll on her tongue, to gamble with heartbreak,...
Most writers of fiction are interested in anonymity. If they aren’t tickled by the thought when they sit down to write their first books, they get to that point after the first couple...
Do you drop things? Do you trip and hurl cups of tea ahead of you, going upstairs? Do your possessions have a life of their own in which they dither idiotically on your fingertips, then make a...
To interview Marguerite Duras, you had to speak Duras. ‘Durassien’ stood, then and now, for inscrutability. Her novels consist of a succession of paragraphs entire of themselves;...