In 1962 the young Ngugi wa Thiong’o had a piece of good fortune. He had left Kenya for Uganda, where he was enrolled as an undergraduate at Makerere, in Kampala. As he explains in Birth...
‘Dear Tenant, Right before my husband left, he did me a good deed. He hung a heavy mirror I had bought at an estate sale, bevelled, gilt, uncommonly clear. It was as though I’d...
‘The good man’s home is a mask,’ Gustave Flaubert wrote when he was 16. Every ideal was a cover for vanity. How could it be otherwise, when our bodies were ‘composed of...
For Mitzi Angel The man using the pay phone on Wall Street, His back to you, is using it as a urinal, And urinating – only logical! Our degradation is complete. The young woman, a...
The Strandir coast begins with a dirt track, the guttural end of tarmac in a waste of bared rock, grass and scree, and empty coves where great white trunks have floated from Siberia: they...
‘The ends of great fiction do not change, much,’ Zadie Smith wrote eight years ago in an essay about David Foster Wallace. ‘But the means do.’
Out of the folds of the heavenly things I was dreaming of Tom Stoppard in a car saying do you want to come look at my etchings and I thought here at last is someone who will know how this drear...
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...