At bay in wounded country, panting across the loping snowfield for sanctuary of pines. Hounds bungling the line through folds of worried sheep, discharge of oaths and anxious shotguns barking off...
It’s typical of Kazuo Ishiguro’s low-key, misdirecting approach to the business of fiction that, although the book contains such creatures as dragons and pixies, the buried giant...
On 14 March 2011, China’s legislature, the National People’s Congress, endorsed a Five-Year Plan incorporating a firm commitment to enhance the nation’s capacity for...
Erich Auerbach’s criticism offers a remarkable mixture of caution and daring; it’s very modest and very grand. He doesn’t believe in large, baggy words, at times is...
‘Anybody want to Hear R. Frost on Anything?’ the poet asked Louis Untermeyer in 1916. Frost was 42 years old and believed he had an impressive list of lectures ‘in...
The first thing the narrator of 10:04 does is make a lot of money.
In the preface to The Ambassadors written for the New York Edition of 1909, Henry James insisted that although the conception of the novel required that the unfolding action be in some sense...
The Old Days Remember when everyone on earth was pregnant except for you which was a miracle and the babies jangled down on their cords like oxygen masks during unplanned cabin decompression ...
On 2 July 1789, a man whose official designation in the prison fortress of the Bastille was ‘Monsieur Six’ addressed the people of Paris. He spoke – or shouted – from...
Dionysius of Halicarnassus once likened Aeschylus’ poetry to this Cyclopean wall beneath Apollo’s temple before us, this wall I always gaze on whenever in Delphi, blocks shaped like...
That rather sprawling foursquare spelling. Always in my mind half- associated with the hirsute 14-year-old I saw in the newspaper who sued his local education authority to keep his beard from a...
Still they...
If you were throwing a pity party among American playwrights, the antisocial, alcoholic, self-dramatising misery named Eugene Gladstone O’Neill would win the door prize.
We that have been hunting all the day are mighty tired, our hair is dank with sweat and by our hunting helmets plastered flat. As days of hunting go, this must be counted a good day: the horns...
In 1906, May Aldington, a writer and innkeeper, published a novel called Love-letters that Caused a Divorce. It tells the story of Kitty Yorke, who falls in love with a married man. She...
Daniel Kehlmann’s new novel, F, takes the risk of starting with a set piece. The first sentence runs: ‘Years later, long since fully grown and each of them enmeshed in his own...
One day her sister asked Mz N to have her baby. This was intriguing this was frightening as there had been no babies come thru her & to have a baby not her baby seemed a strong hard thing to...
The motorcycle looks somewhat dated but is indisputably an angel. Like an electric chair before the current goes on. Like an electric chair before the switch is thrown. You’ve eaten your...