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...
For the final part of this novel’s first movement, our young hero, Serge Carrefax, travels to Kloděbrady’, a presumably Austro-Hungarian spa town, to take a cure. It’s 1913,...
Papers speak through their writers. And of all the London Review’s writers Frank Kermode was the one through whom we spoke most often and most eloquently. In all he wrote nearly 250 pieces...
First published in Australia in 2008, The Slap won last year’s Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and has been long-listed for the Booker Prize. On the dust-jacket of the British edition,...
Late 16th-century England had no very great portrait painters, but at least one of its dramatists created a gallery of images – principally through his characters – at once brilliant...
In Shirley Jackson’s best-known story, ‘The Lottery’, the residents of a small New England village get together on a summer morning to draw lots. The sun shines, the children...
April 1993. In the bookstall at Nice airport I notice a paperback with the title Le Chercheur d’or. It seems to be about a love affair and a search for hidden treasure at the turn of the...
The Mark After that Etruscan she-wolf tenting milk-fat twins, the grabby cherubs added fairly awkwardly around the time of Michelangelo, we chance upon Marsyas, nearly dead. Boxer’s nose....
for my sister Polly 1950-2004 You had to go to bed ahead of us even then, while your two older brothers grabbed another hour downstairs. The seven-year gap was like a generation between us. You...
The last piece in L’Eté, a collection of Camus’s essays first published in 1954, ends on a characteristic note of risk and grandeur: ‘I have always had the impression of...
Parrot and Olivier in America is the singular and surprising offspring of an unlikely coupling between two different novels: one, a fantasia on Tocqueville’s travels in America in 1831, the...
Pearl Buck was the favourite novelist of both my grandmothers, which like their shingle haircuts and their trust in authority, their Coca-Cola brisket, has always seemed an example of the...