for John Berger It was called a hand as proof, spotless and caught like watching a false cuff, kind of. It is a pepper mill or a path like a vision along to the...
The affinity between the Fox, Wolf, Jackal, and several varieties of the Dog, in their external form and several of their properties, is so striking, that they appear to be only varieties of the...
There is no evidence that Rimbaud ever visited Scarborough. Graham Robb At times, it feels like someone else’s dream, copious rain, when it comes, and the sense of Paraclete in every...
We think of immigration as a movement in space, from one country to another. In conventional terms, those who were born in the United States are American; those who were not are immigrants....
Riddle 78 Often I [ ] floods [ ]...
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...
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...