A coincidence: I wrote the first page of ‘It’ on St Patrick’s Day with Irish pipers tuning up down in the street 12 floors beneath. In the parade along 5th Avenue they carried...
If you go to the website of the restaurant L’Huîtrière (3, rue des Chats Bossus, Lille) and click on ‘translate’, the zealous automaton you have stirred up will...
The Norwegian writer Per Petterson’s best-known novel, Out Stealing Horses (2005), won praise and prizes, and was an international bestseller. It opens with Trond, a man in his sixties who...
Exiles I The Super Chief speeds across the American West. Herr Doktor Doktor Von Geist pulls the ends of his moustache, almost like a seabird manoeuvring his wings in unsettled weather, while he...
I A manor house in ruin. It suits me down to the ground. A tower to write in, three rooms for the family, with a kitchen, and all for fifty crowns a month. Unbelievably filthy, I have to say:...
To the modern world Andrew Marvell is a poet. Earlier times knew him differently. From his death in 1678 until the late Victorian era he was mainly admired not for his poetry but for his...
Nothing along the road. Butpetals, maybe. Pink behindand white inside. Nothing butthe coping of a bridge. Muteson the bricks, hard as putty,then, in the sun, as metal.
‘I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.’ Marcel Duchamp A sonnet is a rectangle upon the page. Your eye enjoys it in a ratio of eight to...
Sarah Bernhardt’s strangest gift – or so it seems a hundred years after the fact – was her ability to make the most improbable people go cuckoo over her. An otherwise mopey...
Many authors begin writing in childhood, but that the Brontës did so seems peculiarly apt. There is something childlike about their sensibility, with its merging of fantasy and reality, its...
The Austrian novelist and playwright Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) once said: ‘You have to understand that in my writing the musical component comes first, and the subject matter is...
In the 1980s I translated some of the late novels and stories of Alberto Moravia, elderly but still prolific. These books, which abandoned observation of society for concerns with ageing and sex,...
Born in 1914, Randall Jarrell belonged to the first generation of American poets who found a ready home in the country’s burgeoning university system. Of the great modernists of the...
From...
The title of Tao Lin’s sixth book and second novel is an act of mild provocation. Richard Yates belongs to a biography, not a novel – certainly not one in which Yates himself...
i. One reason why we stay in Mergellina in our favourite city Napoli ’s to eat fresh shellfish with volcanic Falanghina at Pasqualino’s outside in the street in the Piazza Sannazaro,...
Philip Larkin met Monica Jones in 1946 at Leicester University College. She was an assistant lecturer there, and Larkin was an assistant librarian. Both had firsts in English from Oxford. Monica...
Alfred Hitchcock’s Rich and Strange (1931) includes a quietly compelling scene set on a Tube train packed with office-weary commuters. The dim and sluggish hero finds himself standing next...