Between 1975 and 1983, Luther Blissett made 246 appearances as a striker for Watford FC and scored 95 goals. When he joined the club they were in the Fourth Division. When he signed for AC Milan...
Piece human, piece hornet, the fury of both, astonishing abs all over it. Ripped, just ripped to absolute bits, his head in the hornet and his head in the hum, and oh he want to sting her. The...
Mother Reilly’s Daughter! Trompe l’oeil Ale! Aphasic Skywalk! Night at the hub pub, microbrews and boutique pinots – In its throes, Does one ever hear the Mädchen cry from...
‘The test of poetry which professes to be modern’, Arthur Symons wrote in 1892, is ‘its capacity for dealing with London, with what one sees or might see there.’ And what...
after Francis Ponge Orange As for the sponge, so for the orange: the aspiration to regain face after being wrung into expression. However, the sponge succeeds always, the orange never, segments...
From Chambord-pink at the base, it clears to where the upper curve reflects a skull-cap of charcoal, giving the earthʼs atmosphere in miniature: the sea, the air, then space. Erupting from that...
If Taiye Selasi’s debut novel was as fascinating as its acknowledgments pages the book would be a triumph. Acknowledgments in books have gone the way of Oscar acceptance speeches in recent...
In October 1922, Fitzgerald moved his family to Great Neck, Long Island and over the next 18 months the novel acquired a Midwestern background, a poor boy-rich girl theme, a narrative structure and a...
In 1950 André Breton published a prose poem by Octavio Paz in a surrealist anthology. He thought one line in the work was rather weak and asked Paz to remove it. Paz agreed about the line...
In 1962, the daughter of a friend of Dorothy Baker’s went up to her house in Terra Bella, California, to interview the 55-year-old novelist. ‘What is your real purpose in this...
Lionel Shriver rarely lingers over physical descriptions, with one great exception: she’s highly conscious of how much her characters weigh.
My Life in Letters There you are, looking like the Khan’s most favoured concubine, but in a London doorway, cigarette and beige Aquascutum, smiling, at me, it would seem, all ardour,...
Salter’s images are an aspect of the virtuosity that makes him singular: his mastery of time, the raw material of narrative fiction.
Anyone can have a Marc Jacobs handbag if they can raise the money, but it isn’t just anyone who can have the one belonging to Paris Hilton.
‘You watch your mother slice up a lengthy white radish and boil it over an open fire. The sun has banished the dew, and even unwell as you are, you no longer feel cold.’ The following...
Printed with old roses or tartans and thistles, there’s a biscuit tin like this in every house. Prise off the lid and catch the flinty scent of old keys, decommissioned and sleeping. Like...
It’s perhaps Munro’s consistency that her admirers cherish: ‘like butterscotch pudding on the boil’.
Kate Atkinson is in no danger of prosecution for misrepresenting goods. Life after Life does exactly what it says on the spine of the book, offering a number of versions of the life of Ursula...