‘Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?’ snapped Edmund Wilson, writing in the New Yorker in 1945. He refused to find out who did, because he’d already discovered that Agatha...
Last year’s Man Booker judges took a largely deserved kicking when they said they were looking for ‘readable’, ‘enjoyable’ books that ‘zip along’. But I...
Mervyn Peake, the son of a medical missionary, was born just over a hundred years ago in Kiang-Hsi Province, China. The family moved back to England when he was 12. He attended the Royal Academy...
When Jane Austen became famous at the age of 38, she didn’t go to literary lunches, meet her readers or take tea with Madame de Staël. But she did accept one invitation, from the...
‘A ladder’, the master whispered, ‘of nucleic acid.’ This was the first we’d heard of it. Rain nosed the glass; wind lashed the trees outside. ‘Four...
There were three cities; each of them had known a certain glory. In each of them, there was a sense that the glory was absent or ghostly, that the real world was elsewhere, that the cities in...
You were still only a child, I, 19, the age of your eldest boy now. It was the evening of the Marijuana Caper your eyes first met mine at the China Chalet. I believe it would have been spring,...
‘You know,’ a teenage girl says to Toru Okada, the narrator of Haruki Murakami’s novel The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, whom she’s found at the bottom of a dried-up well doing...
It’s easy to think of literary forgers simply as greedy people who are good at making bits of paper look old. But there is nothing simple about the history of Shakespearean forgery. It...
Hers sheathed in black velvet embroidered in gold thread and sequined panthered and ankled Napoleonic by couches to turbaned tantamount no less, slender more supple even than Antoinette young...
The cultural consequences of 22 November 1963 are far more interesting than the events of the day itself. Historians like me tend not to find much of interest in the killing of one person by...
At the turning point of this second volume of Beckett’s letters, which is also the turning point of his professional life, the moment when, after so many years of ‘retyping …...
I impersonate myself and here I am, Prick pointing at the moon, teeth sunk into your calf. I ought to warn the concrete that my passion dooms the dam. The poem I’m writing looks up at me...
When he was 23, A.S.J. Tessimond (Arthur Seymour John, Jack to his family, but known as John in later life) wrote to Ezra Pound, who had recently settled in Rapallo, enclosing some poems and an...
A doctor and former seminarian, Chris Adrian has over the past decade written three sprawling novels of unusual thematic scope and one collection of highly inventive short stories. His first...
The Shelter I should never have stayed in this cold shieling once the storm passed and the rain had finally eased. I could make out shapes in here, the occasional sound: a muffled crying which I...
It is said that Robinson Crusoe has been translated into every written language, including Latin, Coptic, Inuit, Maori and Esperanto. There is a version for children entitled Robinson Crusoe in...
‘Sometimes,’ a woman says during phone sex in Vox, Nicholson Baker’s first foray into smut, ‘I think with the telephone that if I concentrate enough I could pour myself...