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...
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.