All fictions are closed worlds, smaller than our own, and so it is not surprising that novelists are often drawn to represent very small worlds – boarding houses, hotels, a plague-sealed...
‘Beyond Albany and Syracuse …’ As handwriting sprawls a page, revealing much about the writer’s psyche, so too these lemons, dividends of peace, in our time, my friend....
Faith The tent show had been and gone and now there was nothing but rust and sunlight, like a poultice on the grass, candy and broken glass and a spare tatter of hallelujah blown through the...
Sonnet of Addressing Gertrude Stein Here is a pronoun to address Gertrude Stein with : dog you’ve never had before has died. Drop’t Sonnet When a language drops a distinction (as...
Some 25 years after Alsace had been returned to France at the end of the Second World War, I took an opportunity to work there for a few months, in the belief that it would improve my French. A...
Jonathan Franzen has in the past been a writer who has flourished in sequences and streaks, in set-pieces and sections, the kinds of book of which you could ask: ‘What are your favourite...
Ever since Mephistopheles summoned a devil to delude Faust into believing that Helen of Troy stood before him and would make him immortal with a kiss, there has been something fugitive about her; for Laurie...
Lakeside As optical illusions go it was one of the more spectacular, a little group of bright stars appearing to move along the night sky as if on a secret mission while, of course, it was the...
Piano If I could read music And play the piano I’d interrupt you With no notice Wherever you are In some seminar In Edinburgh Or sitting alone In your office. Today I’d haul my piano
For more than three decades, the makers of American opinion have evaded the full significance of the Vietnam War – the mendacity, the brutality, the futility. The collective amnesia has...
George Crosby, the hero of Paul Harding’s Pulitzer Prize-winning first novel, Tinkers, has been laid out to die on a rented hospital bed in his living-room, surrounded by his wife, children...
Stefan Collini writes: ‘Yes, I’d like that very much. That really would be something to look forward to.’ Frank was already weakened and wasted by throat cancer, but my...
‘I gather you’re my wife,’ said the man in the waiting room. ‘I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure. Might one know your name?’ Middle-aged and scrawny he...
Although Orlando Furioso has comic elements, it is not a comic poem. It is a chivalric romance which incorporates traditional matter – duels, jousts, quests, amorous adventures, damsels in...
How did Nicola Barker end up choosing Burley Cross in West Yorkshire – ‘a tiny, ridiculously affluent, ludicrously puffed-up moorside village stuffed to capacity with spoilt...
It’s been two years since the last one, so it must be time for a new book of poems by John Ashbery. Like the old James Bond films, Ashbery’s late instalments arrive punctually, and...
In an essay on Avatar in the March issue of the French film journal Cahiers du cinéma, Slavoj Žižek wrote that, despite its superficial espousal of revolutionary action (by blue-skinned...
Migrating Birds If only I had a dog, these crows congregating In my yard would not hear the end of it. If only the mailman would stop by my mailbox, I’d stand in the road reading a letter...