Glück appears to have decided early on to devote herself to melancholy subjects. In the darkly funny ‘To Autumn’ from The House on Marshland (1975), her second collection, the poet sees azaleas and...
Ivan the Terrible was Europe’s first Russian celebrity. Between the late 16th and the mid-17th century, a great rush of books was published about him and his domain. Many of these accounts,...
Self-Portrait as Picture Window First day of snow, the low sun glinting on the gate post where a single Teviot ewe is licking frost-melt from the bars, the other sheep away in the lower field,...
Colum McCann has described Jim Crace as ‘quite simply, one of the great writers of our time’, Aleksandar Hemon as ‘quite frankly, the greatest writer of our generation’,...
Last summer, the National Theatre put on Timon of Athens as a play about the credit crunch. Simon Russell Beale was the glossy, well-fed protagonist, a wealthy patron of the arts and liberal...
Hindsight is the way we make sense of the world, and the events and impressions of the morning are reworked any number of times before evening, with the result that any historical novel is bound...
Leavis bequeathed a confidence in the essential value of any intelligent reader’s intense engagement with the best literature.
There was a drawer in every room of our house and in every drawer there was a white pamphlet. On the cover it said: ‘Who, Me?’ My mother had placed the pamphlets there in the hope...
A Problem with the Landing Gear Cars travelling the other way On the other side of the double yellow dividing line Carry people you don’t know and never will. The woman on the other side of...
Among the many delights to be found in Roger Lonsdale’s New Oxford Book of 18th-Century Verse is a squib by Thomas Holcroft, provoked by some disparaging remarks Voltaire made about...
In Stockholm before receiving the Nobel prize, Mo Yan spoke up in favour of censorship: it was, he said, a bit like airport security.
What kind of politics of representation is in play if you’re writing novels about East Asian countries in English? Is it more complicated or less if you’re Malaysian and a Cambridge...
Keepers 1. On ‘Buried Alive’, possessions can’t be lost or found. They can’t be exchanged. They’re negotiated as one negotiates a landfill. 2. In the militarised...
for my uncle, Alfred Miles1909-87 ‘they created a desert, and they call it peace’* and that could have been said of Carthage, though it wasn’t. It was much closer to home....
Marxism has thrived as a way of thinking about art and literature, especially at times – the 1920s or the 1990s – when Marxist economic and political thinking has gone into retreat....
To go on a starvation diet in terms of the comma (including the inverted ones that designate speech), as Eimear McBride does in her remarkable, harshly satisfying first novel, may not seem a...
Borges said his essay ‘The Homeric Versions’ represented his first appearance as a Hellenist. ‘I do not think I shall ascend to a second,’ he added. This modest forecast...
Telex from Cuba, Rachel Kushner’s first novel, was set in the American colony in Oriente Province in the years leading up to the revolution. It described a place in which many had very...