The flies are devoted to this appassionata. The church tower has magnetised the mob. Nothing but jugglers, stilt-walkers, flame-spitters, the thrashed bells’ lingering throb. Why do they...
When Jorge Luis Borges was dying in Geneva in 1986, a friend committed an elegant Freudian act of homage. He mentioned Borges’s book of poems The Golden Coin and was instantly corrected:
We routinely use figurative language drawn from the human sphere when talking about ants – queen, soldier, worker – and there’s a long literary history of comparing people to ants: the Trojan soldiers...
Sonnets have no rival. They’ve been written about kingfishers, love, squirrels, the moon (too often), God, despair, more love, grief, exultation, time, decay, church bells beyond the stars...
Craig Raine’s Heartbreak is a novel in the sense in which Eton is a school near Slough. The description is true but misleading. It is really a collection of short stories, loosely linked by...
In March 2009, the former television journalist Mauricio Funes became the first leftist to win the presidency of El Salvador. ‘Now it’s the turn of the aggrieved,’ Funes said,...
And that you hold the same one hawk each day I pass through my field up. And that it...
The marketing blurbs for Bret Easton Ellis’s new novel, Imperial Bedrooms, would have it be a sequel to Less than Zero, the 1985 novel that made him famous. It is, after a fashion: all of...
Among the cases before the magistrates at the Middlesex Sessions of 1 December 1613 was one which involved three French ‘goldworkers’ resident in the parish of St Giles without...
Ravished Is the night Chilly and dark? The night is chilly But not dark. An all but full April moon Slides above barely visible clouds, and is greeted By a burst of hooting from an urban Tawny...
David Mitchell’s new novel is set on and around an artificial island called Dejima, constructed in the bay of Nagasaki to house representatives of the Vereenigde Oest-Indische Compagnie...
The Marriage If I had an ounce of good sense I’d stay put in the country, Rising early to hear the birds And see the sun come up, Taking long walks after lunch, Stopping only to talk to a...
In three hundred and thirty B.C. when ships always tried to sail within sight of land, at the west exit from earth’s middle sea DON’T GO THROUGH was carved. That small strait led to...
This book describes itself on its jacket as ‘a retelling of the life of Jesus’ and also as a book about ‘how stories become stories’; which might lead one to expect some...
If Knut Hamsun is remembered at all in Britain – he never really caught on here – it is as the Nobel Prize-winning Norwegian writer who became a Nazi, and a betrayer of his country...
But a voice that scorns chorales is yelling ‘Wanker!’ Tony Harrison, ‘V’ 1. There’s oil and backwash from these boats departing Hamburg’s morning wharves....
Songs of PapuszaI was once besotted with a black-eyed boy. The young menof my kumpania stretched him out in an àshariba. Only thendid Dion´yzy Wajs, ancient Dion´yzy Wajs, pay his...
Sometime later he was hit By a train – head lowered in the cold, Somewhat deaf by the age of 50. Not so repentant as startled, As in a movie where the dying man Gazes at some bird or cloud...