T here’s a strange moment in Ha Jin’s new novel when the narrator, Feng Danlin, an expatriate Chinese journalist writing on culture and politics for an independent news agency...
here. Have been for centuries. No, longer. Everything already has been. It’s not a reasonable place, this continuum between us, and yet here again I put the olive trees in, turn the whole...
W hen I remember my dreams at all, they’re not stories but feelings. I once dreamed I was breastfeeding a flamingo, and I could feel the beak, even in the morning telling, before I saw...
I t’s always Roy Fisher who comes to mind when I consider the phenomenon of those who come to know a place, especially a city, through literature, photography, painting, film or music,...
in memoriam Jenny Diski 1947-2016 Pale duty stamps about in plenty of nothing like the night when you knew everything to time when each step was...
The gradual disappearance of one familiar face after another, to Manchester, or Ibiza, or the ominous-sounding ‘New Zealand’, fills the screen with ghosts, who seem to exist in...
T here are a few facts and dates. I would like to do without them, or fiddle with them, in the sense that the person they govern is a great writer, and would have been a great writer without...
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...
R oland 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...
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...
A t 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...
I n 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...
T hese 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...