The Two-Handled Jug A low-flying stork. Two acres of graves, guarded and layered in rose-pink. Walls, city, dust. We have been here for ever. Anonymous pinchpenny plague tombs from medieval...

‘Let Spades be trumps!’ she said, and trumps they were; it leaves us free to cry, and whisper to their souls to go. Nor wilt thou then forget where are the legs with which you run,...

I The room darkens, then darkens further with the approach of yet another storm cell from the west with its columns and plaits, the tall, ghostly chambers of space between –une fraction...

I remember being struck in the late 1970s by the vigour of gay culture in the American marketplace. Two novels were selling strongly and being urgently discussed: one was lyrical and would-be...

In the spring of 2008, shortly after he started reading Infinite Jest, my friend Francis got in touch to say a) he found the book astonishing, everything I’d said it was, one of the...

Linda Grant’s new novel, We Had It So Good, begins in sunshine. There’s the epigraph: ‘He had like many another been born in full sunlight and lived to see night fall.’...

‘America created the 20th century,’ Gertrude Stein wrote in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, ‘and since all the other countries are now either living or commencing to be...

Alongside the burial record for Oliver Gunne, an apprentice who died in Stratford-upon-Avon in July 1564, are the words hic incepit pestis: ‘Here begins the plague.’...

Was it Leon, your cousin, or Leon, the tow-headed boy with the scar like a crescent moon beneath his ear you dated for almost a year in that backwater town where you lived when you lived with...

In August 1867, Thomas Carlyle published one of his most virulent diatribes against ‘swarmery’, by which he meant the trend towards democracy. The immediate inspiration for...

I think this is all somewhere inside myself, the incessant burning of my birth             all shine...

‘Actors don’t lodge in the culture as once they did,’ David Thomson writes in the entry on Heath Ledger in the latest edition of his Biographical Dictionary of Film. ‘They...

Tristan Garcia was only 26 when this dazzlingly clever and assured first novel came out in France, published there as La Meilleure Part des hommes and now in Britain and America under the...

In November 1894 Henry James set down in his notebooks an outline for the novel that, eight years later, became The Wings of the Dove. He wrote about a heroine who was dying but in love with...

Worst. Movie. Ever. A woman visits a private detective and asks him to find her lost virginity. Or, let’s say, a time bomb has been planted in Midtown New York; our hero has to defuse it,...

All around in            houses near us, the            layoffs,...

I was delighted to be taken out and shot. It made my day. The following week I was savagely attacked by a gang of what would have been ruffians, but for my welcoming courtesies. They beat me up...

Louis MacNeice’s influence is everywhere in contemporary poetry, in its forms and in its forms of engagement. Certain strands in his work – questions of identity, nationality,...