Who invented English literature? As good a claimant as any is the London bookseller Jacob Tonson (1656–1736), who dominated the publishing business of his day and died a landed gentleman worth a reported...
At some point they got off at Gelsenkirchen, which is on the same train line as Hanover, and while there, had their portraits taken. That’s all the sense I can make of this stopover on...
Here’s a naked fellow dressed up in some clothes, Arrogantly flaunting what he actually loathes – The Savile Row swagger and the nonchalant pose! He’s who he isn’t and he...
Zero K doubles down on Don DeLillo’s inward-looking impulse, but in other ways, length included, it’s his most expansive book since the 1990s. It’s a kind of greatest-hits compilation of earlier...
‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story, as E.M. Forster told us long ago. ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot.
It’s possible that the expression ‘tearing through a book’ has something to answer for. I read All That Man Is at a not particularly expedient time, furiously, unappeasably,...
The practice of modelling in negative space, making absent volume perform as part of the dynamism of the whole, is a standard technique in visual arts, in sculpture above all, but there is a...
Milton lost his sight in libertyes defence and I my hearing in oyles pursuit employed by factors who failed to plug our ears with down I was the fuse-and-dynamite boy who blew up bits of...
machine of spring with all your levers thrown to max clouds in ripped clothes and sheep trailing afterbirth where last week’s buds sucked blue juice from the dusk now the branch is...
Heaney was not in any simple sense a ‘Virgilian’ poet, but the sixth book of Virgil’s Aeneid mattered more to his later writing than any other single text.
Eileen is 24, all ribs, shoulders and hips with ‘lemon-sized’ breasts and nipples ‘like thorns’. She still has acne scars across her cheeks. She wears thick tights and...
Space programs/screwbean mesquite/barrel cactus Ecoregion/section/tract The intricacies of a desert...
James Merrill has in Langdon Hammer the biographer he would have wished for: intelligent, appreciative, sympathetic, thorough, a first-rate reader of the poems, and an excellent writer to...
When Truman Capote was looking for a news story to turn into what he called a ‘non-fiction novel’, he was initially concerned that such an event might date very quickly, that it...
Only those who actively dislike poetry didn’t like him. The others could care less. There were too many other things to worry about, like is my licence expired yet? Fortunately there...
So much in the life and work of Ted Hughes was weird and transgressive that even now, 18 years after his death, it is hard to assess his actions and literary achievement.
On 7 January 1669, Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary that he and his wife had seen ‘a pretty good play’ at the king’s playhouse, with ‘many good things being in it...
Long before electronic media came up with the phrase, literature had been relegated to the status of preferred ‘content provider’ for films. Bestsellers achieve special ontological...