On 18 May 1961, towards the end of Session 45 of the Eichmann trial, Judge Halevi asked State Prosecutor Bar-Or if he’d finished submitting into evidence all the documents relevant to...
Now anything can happen, anything in the world, you just name it, you just think it and it will appear like a father in a hallway who is less an astronaut and more a meteor which reminds me about...
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On 18 July 2003, the body of the weapons inspector David Kelly was found in the woods on Harrowdown Hill in Oxfordshire, two months after he’d revealed that the Blair administration had...
A classic, according to Italo Calvino, is ‘a book that has never finished saying what it has to say’. I have read Sylvia by Leonard Michaels four or five times and I still...
The body as the sum of all nostalgias. Empire of footfalls; Mother as Script and Ideal – and love no chance event, no accidental stir of wings, or blueprint spiked with hospice. What hymn...
All you men crouching by a nine-carriage train that’s stopped sauntering through the countryside, I know you dream that what you’ve made will move again. I know why you stay stooping ...
D.J. Taylor is the most charitable of critics. However absurd, third-rate or pretentious the authors he examines, he can always find something to say in their favour. In this latest study, he...
Salman Rushdie’s latest novel is a version of The Arabian Nights – two years, eight months and 28 nights adds up to 1001 of them. But it’s updated in every way. The climax,...
for Fred ‘Empiricism’ has been gone far more often than not; I think I originally learned it in my teens. Now I sometimes find it by alphabetising, but most of the time it’s gone...
We sit there, slowly doing the quick crossword, noting as so often in institutions the presence of characters who seem habitués, knowing the procedures, familiar with the staff, A&E...
For Don Paterson Rain works the road; its grey hand passing over and over, in waves: lashing, stotting down. A stour-wind’s in the trees, churning their heads, and the sky’s full of...
The two great preoccupations of Barnes’s Shostakovich are his own character weaknesses and his relationship to the Soviet regime.
From any imaginable perspective the middle of the first century BC was an interesting time in Rome. More and more people and resources were coming more and more under the control of one single...
‘Le Amiche’: The Mourners at the River and the Drowned Woman The problem with the women gathering at the riverbank. Of the river Po. The problem is the absence of other rivers,...
Hemingway and Wallace Stevens got in a fight, Drunken fisticuffs in Paris over who was right. En garde! Put up your dukes! Then one of them suddenly pukes. The moon turned into the sun overnight....
In the autumn of 1994, Jim Grant, a technical director at Granada Television, went to the Arndale Centre in Manchester and bought three A4 pads and a pencil. He was nearly forty and about to...
‘What is a hesitation, if one removes it altogether from the psychological dimension?’Giorgio Agamben, The End of the PoemThere is a moment in William Empson’s Seven Types of...