By spring 1919, Robert Graves was a demobilised war veteran, a new father and the author of four volumes of poetry. At this moment came ‘the first poem I wrote as myself’, as his...
‘Perhaps, Miss Marcella, it may be that in your last situation, the house did not have a panic room?’
Down below Riverside Park, On the river side of the West Side Highway, I walked along the bicycle path The Hudson flows past hugely, Across the way from New Jersey. And on the other side of the...
It was an old book about crime detection, with pictures of murders and the places where they were committed, including street plans showing you how to get there. You were supposed to solve the...
Metaphors. The little devils just wriggle in everywhere. ‘Put a lid on it,’ ‘get stuck in,’ ‘shut your trap’: they’re a routine feature of vernacular...
Devotees of the gritty police procedural must brace themselves for shocks when they enter the world of Fred Vargas, whose fine detective stories have won her three International Daggers. In...
My dark Brazilian friend, seventy years back In Washington. Both of us were foreign, On the edge of Gordon Junior High. After my English prep-school shine wore off, My grades slid down and I lost...
Tumps of fish rotting He couldn’t sell The yellow yard of a cabin I’d gone to a party With friends Who slipped off Among cypress, sometime Before morning, When I was rousted To...
In The Orchid Boat, the most recent of his more than 25 collections, Lee Harwood lights out from his seaside eyrie in Hove to many places, real, dreamed of or imagined: New Zealand,...
If only the stories were not so tempting – but from day one I started to embroider, and in no time was suggesting a country far to the North where fish are as large as dragons, and even...
Michel Houellebecq’s novel about a Muslim takeover of France is a melancholy tribute to the pleasure of surrender.
‘To abdicate your power is so much harder than it seems,’ the narrator of Lurid & Cute says. It’s a difficulty that Adam Thirlwell’s fiction up to this point has...
Hendrick Avercamp (1585-1634): A Standing Man Watching a Skating Boy No doubt, in a year or two, this child will be gone; rumours of war in the air and boys at that age always impatient for...
Time and again, however well we know the landscape of love,and the little churchyard with lamenting names …...
[First Season] Like where...
Last year – year one of the Great War centenary – David Jones’s In Parenthesis, a long prose-and-verse evocation of his first months as a soldier, got a decent outing. The...
I must needs acknowledge, that the Greeke and Latine tongues, are great ornaments in a Gentleman, but they are purchased at over-high rate. Montaigne, Essays I grew up in postwar...
MAN: It’s hard to imagine you with tired eyes, mademoiselle. Perhaps you don’t know, but you have very beautiful eyes. GIRL: They will be beautiful, monsieur, when the time comes...