When and where does modern war begin? With tanks or gas warfare in 1914-18? With the aerial bombardment of civilians in Mesopotamia in 1920? At Guernica in 1937? With the general conscription,...
Anyone might want to celebrate their life in print. Or a long-term relationship brought to a close by death. Lots of people write about their lives and their loved ones, and some pay to have...
Of the two dogs the car hit, one, two, while we were talking, and thinking about...
1: September Kettles, rain hats – the small, unopened bottle of Angostura bitters, its label stained and faded with the years. The breeze is doing something in the leaves it hasn’t...
Until 15 or 20 years ago most students of English literature would have known one thing about Anna Letitia Barbauld, which was her appearance in a droll anecdote told by Samuel Taylor Coleridge...
Like any couple don’t whistle I’m not your good dog she’d/say I’d say swimming at this hour you must be mad
stretched out on the grass, and tried to relax. A delightful breeze stirred his beard but his ear-canals ached, and his tongue felt bloated. While there is blood in these veins, he mused, and I...
Violet Trefusis was born on 6 June 1894, the elder daughter of Alice Keppel, a famously discreet mistress of the future Edward VII. ‘I wonder if I shall ever squeeze as much romance into my...
For any serious French writer who has come of age during the last 30 years, one question imposes itself above all others: what do you do after the nouveau roman? Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon...
It’s not why Rimbaud left that mystifies, though this new year the Place Ducale sports ice rink, carousel, and a waffel-stand from nearby Belgium. It’s why he kept returning. On ne...
Cesare Pavese kept a diary from 1935, when, aged 27, he was ‘exiled’ to Calabria for anti-Fascist activities, until 1950, when he committed suicide. During those years he became a...
The American historical novelist E.L. Doctorow has spoken of the adventure of his process of composition, of the excitement of not knowing where he is going to end up. For a reader, too, the...
I see you in the morning and I see you in the evening. That doesn’t stop the other things. The shorebirds and the shellfish make merry in the giant oil spill. The fire drill bell rings and...
In novels, a marriage is not only the place where comedy ends: it is also the place where tragedy begins. The wedding of Lil Roth, the opening act of Joanna Smith Rakoff’s A Fortunate Age,...
When Samuel Johnson, travelling in the Highlands with James Boswell, reaches Loch Ness, he is so overwhelmed by the massiveness of the landscape that the heavy order of his prose is briefly...
Strongly fancied at the start of 1833 to win the Great Doncaster St Leger, Mr Gully’s bay colt Frankenstein (by Young Phantom, out of My Lady) failed to live up to expectations. Beaten into...
Here’s a novella of slightly over 30,000 very plain words – Philip Roth’s shortest book since The Prague Orgy – structurally straightforward, winnowed of syntactical...
Law of the Island They lashed him to old timbers that would barely float, with weights at the feet so only his face was out of the water. Over his mouth and eyes they tied two live mackerel with...