Dylan Thomas’s foredoomed premature death feels intrinsic to his late romanticism.
1. What we are most easily seduced by must tell us something about ourselves, but what if it tells us only about everyone else? If you want to get to know someone (tweets the prolific Kelly...
All logophiles have their weaknesses. Mine is technical vocabulary drawn from handcrafts, especially if those words have an obscure or Germanic origin. Who could resist noggin – an...
Per Petterson makes a small detour in the course of his latest novel’s action, as he steers one of his characters into a bookshop to pass comment on the major Scandinavian cultural...
Twenty years ago, Andrew Motion, one of Philip Larkin’s literary executors, wrote a scholarly and comprehensive authorised biography of the poet, whom he had known well; it was subtitled...
Nothing finally preponderates, no sensation remains, no vision, no synthesis, no understanding.
The prologue of Limonov places Emmanuel Carrère in Moscow, circa 2006, at a commemoration ceremony outside the Dubrovka Theatre, where in 2002 the Nord-Ost hostage crisis ended when the...
for Catherine Lockerbie Late January, and the oak still green, the year already wrong. The season miscarried – the lambs in the field, and the blossom blown – the whole year broken...
Philip Larkin’s ‘Church Going’, when I read it first, came as a relief. For once, someone had said something true, or almost true, about religion and its shadowy aftermath....
There’s a French translation of Anna Karenina that offers an interesting version of the novel’s first sentence. ‘Tous les bonheurs se ressemblent,’ it says, ‘mais...
E.E. Cummings is the sort of poet one loves at the age of 17 and finds unbearably mawkish and vacuous as an adult. But in the mid-20th century he was the most popular poet in the United States...
In 1974, aged 71, having announced the end of a writing career that had produced nearly two hundred novels, and having retreated from a mansion with 11 servants to a small house in Lausanne...
Working with Karl was much more than a job; a day at the front rather than a day in the office.
The blades like irises turning very fast to see you completely – steel-blue then red where the cut occurs – the cut of you – they don’t want to know you they want to own...
The story of Dr Zhivago’s publication is, like the novel itself, a cat’s cradle, an eternal zigzag of plotlines, coincidences, inconsistencies and maddening disappearances.
The Goofiad Um, it wasn’t my project to prise them apart. Pale Jessica had come full circle. Case in point: she spelled one application under presidential law. How it became one of the...
The daughter of a schoolteacher from Wales and a Christianised Russian Jew, Denise Levertov was born in Essex and made her reputation in America writing poems in and about Mexico, Provence and...
Jack London’s writing routine was the single unchanging element of his relatively brief adult life. From the age of 22 until his death at 40, he wrote a thousand words every day, a quota...