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...
Charles Reznikoff may be the most elusive poet in American poetry and his book-length Testimony the most elusive long poem of modernism. He is remembered as a kind of New York saint, an urban...
Nae knickers, all fur coat Slurped Valvona and Crolla, Tweed-lapelled, elbow-patched, tartan-skirted, Kilted, Higgs-bosoned, tramless, trammelled and trammed, Awash with drowned witches...
On 22 May 1724 James Logan, a wealthy Philadelphian fur trader, scientist and bibliophile, took a day trip with friends from London to Windsor. Big crowds accompanied them, and no wonder: they...
A woman’s husband leaves her, she’s determined not to lose it, she loses it, she gets herself back together: that’s the plot of Elena Ferrante’s The Days of...
When Marie-Antoinette couldn’t sleep, she would ring for a lady-in-waiting to come and read to her; a rota of lectrices was on call at Versailles at any time of day or night; before...
‘How often in my life have I said those words, and yet?’ John Banville, Shroud ‘I had jumped,’ Conrad’s Jim says of his abandonment of his ship, adding a...