We were driving along at twenty-five miles an hour. ‘Desperate’ wants to know how the angle tree has went. Or we now can live over a wombat factory, said the woman coming in to see...
The act of making a poem – and it is a made thing, like an Assyrian brooch or Bolognese sauce (thus the word makar for ‘poet’ in old Scots) – requires a large set of...
Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, in which a being that resembles Ted Hughes’s Crow appears to a bereaved husband and his sons, qualifies as a novel by the familiar logic of its not fitting any other...
When he enters your flat, he makes his presence felt – spinning on his axis, smiling and pert, a smile on his lips, a smile on the back of his head! He offers you his hand – his...
Whenever we are in the company of J.M. Coetzee, whether it be an interview, a novel, a memoir or an essay, we are inexorably drawn into the realm of the ethical. We must judge and be judged,...
(Peter Reading, 1946-2011) ‘The only permanence I suppose is in having been’ –...
The pure products of America go crazy, William Carlos Williams wrote, but he was only half right: America’s crazy, and so sometimes its pure products go sane. Consider the eponymous...
‘Nobody knows … nobody knows.’ Elizabeth Bishop said her grandmother’s remark was the chorus of her childhood. ‘I often wondered what my grandmother knew that...
It is a curious fact of history, which my research on antiquarianism has brought home to me, that if something is believed in or wanted for long enough, it will eventually materialise. From...
I have no idea where he has come from, or why he has leaped into my head, this cartoon figure with his head on backwards.
The dancers are stretching, loosening in their dressing rooms, half-dressed in a mess of costume rails, water glasses topped with a dusting of rouge. Although it’s still too soon to...
after Cecco Angiolieri (Siena, c.1260-1312) If I were fire, the world’d burn; if I were wind, there’d be tempests at ev’ry turn; if I were...
Jesuits have left their cliffs of gilded wood; Franciscans stone fronts of rock candy.*Pet ferret with velvet collar in Coyoacán. An iguana on a shoulder in Querétaro.*A man is walking...
In November I had to cancel the teaching I was doing in Norwich to return to Calcutta to visit my mother, who is elderly and ailing. On the 8th, I didn’t pay much attention to the fact...
Perhaps the first ever ‘lifestyle magazine’, Country Life was founded in 1897 to cater for the leisured interests of the upper class, and was devoted to articles on golf and...
This was a 42-year marriage of convenience between forgiving but frequently exasperated business partners and poetry rivals. It was launched with a seize-the-day telegram, after a one-night,...
Beneath the posing and the psychodrama, I Love Dick is an instant-classic feminist Künstlerroman.
About two thirds of the way into Spectre, James Bond (Daniel Craig) is tied to a chair in the desert crater headquarters of Franz Oberhauser (Christoph Waltz), the head of Spectre and by...