So Eliot was sensitive to certain manifestations of the uncanny, and to terrors that might well cause shuddering. We have now to ask a more difficult question: why did those lines of In Memoriam affect...
Fredric Jameson’s pre-eminence, over the last generation, among critics writing in English would be hard to dispute. Part of the tribute has been exacted by his majestic style, one...
My feelings about Martin Amis are complicated, as is surely only proper. His latest novel is odd and discontinuous and in the end incoherent, with much stopping and starting, and echoing of...
Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) was in many ways a farewell to paranoia. Not the paranoid style in American politics, to quote the title of a famous essay by Richard Hofstadter (how could...
Hyperborea after Pindar, Olympian 3 Once past the man-high teeth and the disintegrating ice that separate human lands from the gods’ secret territory, what Herakles found was nothing on...
‘You killed my character!’ Clarice Lispector said angrily to the nurse who stopped her from marching out of hospital the day before she died of ovarian cancer, aged 57, in 1977. The...
Descent Edinburgh Turnhouse, November 2009 I There’s something of the sky in everything or so it seems tonight, lights swimming up from hill-farms in the Pentlands, close to snow between...
Examine Your Fingertips Examine your fingertips for signs of discolouration! One day it will be back, the supposedly eradicated contagion. The postman will drop it in the rattling letterbox along...
In 1997 I went to hear Ian McEwan read from his latest novel, Enduring Love, at a café in a deconsecrated church in Oxford. The passage he chose was the now famous opening chapter, with its...
In 1954 Louis-Ferdinand Céline was still a pariah in France: a collaborator during the Occupation (it had ended only a decade earlier), a notorious anti-semite (his bloodthirsty...
On 2 July 1914, violent thunderstorms heralded the publication in London of the first Vorticist magazine, Blast. Since January that year, there had been the threat of insurrection from the Ulster...
Six is a ‘perfect number’ – it’s the sum of its divisors, 3, 2 and 1 – and it’s favoured for that reason by Azarya Sheiner, a six-year-old mathematical genius...
There’s a revealing slip near the start of John Banville’s new novel. Ursula Godley, whose husband lies dying upstairs, reflects on her son and daughter: ‘These are the...
Year in, year out The guide still follows A well-paced route Through those small rooms Until the tour group Have all been told And told again About the diarist, About the poet, Brother and...
The subtitle of James Shapiro’s engaging new book is a tease. Shapiro, the author of 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005), is in no doubt that William Shakespeare of...
The novel at any given moment has a special relationship with the recent past: worlds contiguous to its own, at the farther reaches of living memory, not yet floated off into history. Colm...
after Victor Hugo Two bullets to the head, the child had taken. It was a clean, honest, humble, quiet place. In blessing, above a portrait, hung a palm cross. His aged granny stood there,...
The woman who’s dying is trying to lose her life. It’s a great adventure For everyone trying to help her. Actually, death avoids her, doesn’t want to hurt her. So to speak,...