He operates out of unremarkable premises. The smell of peardrops comes from the spray-and-body shop. On the other side it’s paintball: NEMESIS. Come in. Please be careful. Mind your step....
T.S. Eliot’s mind was a vast, labyrinthine echo chamber, and perhaps more than any other canonical poet of the English language he was conscious of the previous uses by other writers of the words he...
Lesson Three Dad was not dad. Dad was the mad train screaming daily into the station of his home, white-hot brakes shrieking, exploding across the platforms of the rooms. So regular, so on...
In 2011 Paul Kingsnorth announced his withdrawal from the environmental movement after twenty years of activism. Environmentalists, he complained in a long article published in Orion magazine,...
Saki, living a half-hidden life, was a man who saw the hidden wildness of things; if cows can be murderers, ferrets can be gods. His short stories burst with the possibilities of a world in which strangeness...
Henry James liked to represent himself as hopelessly lagging behind his older brother, but he was also very good at turning childish inadequacy to imaginative account. A year after...
‘Could anything be better than to start off with a fine picture of a sailing ship on the rough sea coming suddenly alive and sucking in the children?’ Stevie Smith asked, reviewing...
In this broad church of reeds and grasses at the north-west tip of Booterstown Marsh two marker posts wait for a lick of Hammerite or windy gloss to cosy up like a ruined script, to connive...
I expect you know why I have asked you here at this late hour. The stars, gentlemen, the stars! They shine as ever, here at End-of-the-line. Do sit awhile and admire the heavens. I have robes and...
The ‘barkskins’ of Annie Proulx’s huge and hugely unsatisfying novel should by rights be trees – things that have bark for skin – but she attaches the word to...
People now talk about big drama serials the way they used to talk about classic novels. If there’s one you haven’t caught up with you feel embarrassed, and you might ask yourself,...
Translating Proust’s novel back into his life, and then the life back into the novel, has been an abiding temptation both for those who know it well and for those who don’t. In...
My Mother’s Mattress Upstairs, in the heat, beside the handkerchiefs, my mother’s navy-blue horsehair mattress still, although it’s August, smells of damp, of horses in the...
Ian McGuire’s second novel is an unflinching look at what men do, in extreme circumstances, for money, to survive, or for no reason at all. It has quite a lot – filth, sex,...
‘Memory,’ my mother remarked, distress masked by her usual self-mocking humour, ‘is a thing of the past.’ She was 85 and sliding into the dementia that would ultimately...
One irony is still very present to me more than a month after reading the book: excluded from his home culture in his lifetime, Dante is absolutely at the centre of it seven hundred years on.
I have a friend whose son was killed in a school shooting. A smallish school shooting. It took place seven years before Columbine got Americans used to the practice of not thinking about...
Can anyone read a biography of Ezra Pound without feeling unsettled? The persistent anti-Semitism; the eager support for Mussolini; the pain and waste of the incarceration, first in a US...