They follow you around the store, these power ballads, you and the women with their shopping carts filled with eggs, cookies, 90 fl.oz. containers of anti-bacterial dishwashing liquid, buffeting...
A penis in pickle, and a dreadful wife made to vanish into another dimension by means of an esoteric yoga pose. A narrator who rapes and murders his wife, gratified that the two climaxes coincide...
after Nonnus Horned child, double-born into risk, guarded by satyrs, centaurs, raised by the nymphs of Nysa, by the Hyades: here he was, the toddler, Dionysus. He cried ‘Daddy!’...
Goethe’s most famous novel was once a Europe-wide sensation. There were Werther-themed prints, figurines, jewellery, perfume, fans, crockery and men’s clothing. The novel itself first...
Working out how to handle a figure as mercurial as Casement should have come naturally to Vargas Llosa.
One of the great attractions of James Fenton’s verse is the way it manages so often to be both plain and cryptic at once. It urges us to think about what we can’t quite know, and it...
A Frost Fair That old cliché: it seemed that time had stopped; and people we thought we knew came quietly out of the cold to meet us. Some of us thought it had something to do with the sun,...
When I complained to my mother that I’d run out of Jane Austen novels, she handed me one by Georgette Heyer. ‘It isn’t quite the same,’ she said, and even then – I...
At the start of Leaving the Atocha Station, Adam Gordon, a young American in Spain for a year on a fellowship, purportedly to write ‘a long, research-driven poem’ about the Spanish...
‘Literature should be naked,’ Peter Stamm writes. Words should never obscure the story, ‘its warmth, its form, its vitality’. It’s form that critics in Germany and...
Old Man Puzzled by His New Pyjamas I am the baby who sleeps in the drawer. Blue yesterday, and blue before – and suddenly all these stripes. The Question Poem Was there a city here? We were...
Stephen Spender was a visitor to the city of Hamburg both before the war and after, when he played a part in the work of occupation and recovery. He was well on his way to being the noted...
In the coloured section of St Louis, back When life was white and black, I’m skimming the modest rooftops in a stolen black Cadillac, Which happens to be my father’s, and I fly too...
In a letter written in July 1926, a couple of months before he embarked on the first version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence gave voice – as he often did – to the...
Like a wind-up denture in a joke store fate approaches, leans quietly. Let’s see … There was moreover meaning in the last clause, meaning we couldn’t equate from what was...
At some point in his mid-forties, the novelist Tim Parks developed a terrible pain, near-constant and located in embarrassing places: his lower abdomen and crotch. ‘I had quite a repertoire...
Compassion was invented in the 18th century, or so the story goes. Sensibility and sympathy were the wellspring of benevolent action and the glue of society (Adam Smith). There were no qualities...
Thass me, your jibber-jabbering Sulawesi booted macaque, most amused to be braining rodents with fig buds from up high, near the tippy top branch of my tuq-tuq tree, and that’s no lie, when...