Lewis Carroll seems an obvious precursor of James Joyce in the world of elaborate wordplay, and critics have long thought so. Harry Levin suggested in 1941 that Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty was...
Thomas Mann wrote this engaging novella in a few weeks in 1943. (The new translation by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann, which is brisk and direct, is a welcome replacement of the fussier and...
Maile Meloy’s first novel, Liars and Saints (2003), told the story of five generations of the Santerre family, Catholic French Canadians displaced to Southern California, and later...
The Maestro is clearly moved by what he has just heard. I’d put us around Bobcat Flats between Fallon and Ely on US 50 in Nevada, which likes to call itself the ‘loneliest road in...
Zhivàkos the Horseman This circle of grass needs to be sited just right – superlevel, softhard, southnorth. Horses are picky. Shires, Shetlands, they’ve attitude just like you...
Lewis Theobald’s Double Falsehood had its premiere at the Theatre Royal on Drury Lane on 13 December 1727. It was a romantic tragicomedy in a Spanish setting; the story was from an episode...
The Glass Chess Set He woke to find a glass chess set by his head, on the bedside table. The vitamins had been removed, the lamp shifted to the floor, the two glasses of water were gone –...
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...