The Welkin We’re patching up an agreement today. The insides won’t let us. I sent you copies by return mail any time soon. We came to a long Q and A period, to which dreams are the...
Elizabeth Jane Howard had been a novelist for forty years before she published The Light Years, the first volume of the Cazalet chronicles, in 1990. The fifth and final volume, All Change, was...
The much gossiped about George Eliot absolutely hated the idea of people talking behind their hands.
One of the curiosities of German literature is a spirited little pamphlet called Pope ein Metaphysiker!, which appeared anonymously in Berlin bookshops in 1755. The argument is tendentious,...
Ode to Prism. Aria. Untitled. Wait. I wait. Have you found me yet. Here at my screen,...
‘What a bitch of a thing prose is!’ Flaubert complained in a letter to Louise Colet while at work on Madame Bovary. ‘It is never finished; there is always something to be done...
In 1888 the Folies-Bergère presented a play called Presse-Ballet, featuring a cast of dancing newspapers and magazines. ‘Le Figaro, Gil Blas, L’Evénement and Le Gaulois...
Just as some faces are a gift to the photographer (Artaud, Patti Smith), so certain lives are a gift to the biographer. These are, broadly, of two types: the hard and gemlike, abbreviated,...
The Bench What passed through your mind, old man, what passed through your mind back then, staring out beyond the shingle and sea wrack, the islets and rocks, to the Olympics on the far shore,...
Jameson finds affect in the profusion of Zola’s France, the streets, the shops, the light, the crowds, the objects and animals, and his amazing examples – dead fish in a market, an array of cheeses,...
‘Morning dearie’. Bond heaved himself awake. A set of teeth was grinning at him from the glass next to his bed. He was in an Innov8 2000 Profiling Hospital Bed with full electronic...
fythynesse, rust, menstrue, swylle, mannys durt, adders egges, the brede of lyes …...
I was 18 when The Secret History swept the world in paperback in 1993. It was a bad age for an encounter with Donna Tartt’s first blockbuster. If I’d been a few years older, I might...
Penelope Fitzgerald was 62 when she won the Booker, a widow and accustomed to making do on very little
For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone;and the place thereof shall know it no more....
Perhaps it was inevitable that Shakespeare’s talent should have been understood in mythological terms from the outset. Even before he published Venus and Adonis (1593) his early plays had...
Tempus fugit every sundial proclaims, yet over and over time seems to swoon, or to expand, even to grind to a juddering halt when I blog; a dreadful day online, I think I mean, is a dreadful day...
Except for the lucky few, the rewards for writing are meagre, if not non-existent. As a money-making enterprise, writing makes no sense. According to the UK’s official graduate careers...