The first two sentences of Richard Ford’s seventh novel have the ring of permanence about them: ‘First, I’ll tell about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the...
I. At 8.46 p.m. at Rudower Höhe, the sentry sneezed and a West Berlin customs officer shouted back: ‘Gesundheit!’ At 11.40 a.m. at the Kiesberg sentry post, three West Berlin...
I suggested a brave new form of entertainment, one based entirely on the emotions – hope and fear for example, the idea being to do whatever you want, then describe your feelings...
That, I suppose, must be my mother’s eye, up there on the monitor: that bobbing dark yolk, fringed by wriggling capillaries and the stainless steel of the speculum that holds her lids...
A prophet is wandering Samaria when he encounters a gang of children. They begin taunting him, pointing out his baldness. The prophet becomes enraged and curses them, and suddenly two female...
Peter Redgrove’s sexual ritual, ‘the Game’, ignited some of his most arresting poetry and was vital to his personal mythology.
In literary costume drama even the most exquisitely wrought lace cuff is only as good as its description.
To rate his achievement at its least, Martin Amis has been for 25 years the By Appointment purveyor of classic sentences to his generation.
‘There is no accounting for tastes,’ the Westminster Review declared in 1866. ‘Blubber for the Esquimaux, half-hatched eggs for the Chinese and Sensational novels for the...
Bring Up the Bodies is not just a historical novel. It’s a novel with a vision of history that magically suits the period it describes. Its predecessor, Wolf Hall, the first part of what...
1 ‘So then you’re Russian? It’s the first time I have met a Russian …’ And the lively, delicately bulging eyes examine me. ‘You take your tea with lemon, I...
You might think that Adam Thirlwell, as an author of self-absorbed sex comedies, had no obvious credentials for writing about the Arab Spring (the title of his first novel, Politics, was a joke)....
By the ends of their lives, two great 20th-century stylists had for decades been the heads of their respective trades, monitoring and publishing the younger talent, attracting unmatched levels of...
In 2010, I moved from California, where I had lived for 11 years, to Turkey, where I had never stayed longer than a month or two.
My little sister walks away from the crash, the black ice, the crushed passenger side, the eighteen-wheeler that destroyed the car, and from a ditch on the side of the highway a white plastic bag...
About ten years ago I went to see Michael Frayn’s Noises Off in the West End. The play has been revived, and rewritten, many times since its first run in 1982 and its place in the farcical...
Mephisto 5I AM A GOD WITH A HUGE FACE. Lionsand eagles pour out of my mouth. Big whitesquare teeth and a red-purple tongue. There aremagenta clouds around my head and thisis my throne room where...
The earliest published image of the Greek Revival building by William Wilkins which stretches across the north side of Trafalgar Square is an engraving that shows it under construction in 1836,...