Inheritance These little steps and quivers Remind me of my mother’s, Yet now they are made by me In part-senility – Gestures and postures passed Across the years, not lost But, as if...
And thus did the Atmospherical Theatre play out, with its transmutations & shifting of vapours, whether the rain-bearing clouds of January riding over our heades like vast Carracks or...
Who could resist the charms, or doubt the importance, of a liberal, secular, Turkish Muslim writing formally adventurous, learned novels about the passionate collision of East and West? Orhan...
The Mirage Like a cartoon of a lost traveller in the desert, Fallen on his knees and dying of thirst, Who sees a quiet pond in the distance Surrounded by tall palm trees, Once on a train...
One of the attractions of Nabokov’s view of literature is that although (or because) he scoffed at any idea of readerly independence he scarcely ever wanted to separate the writer’s...
In his lifetime, Somerset Maugham was the most successful writer in the Anglophone world. By the time he was 90, 80 million copies of his books had been sold, he was a media celebrity and a very...
I was sitting in a booth in the Copenhagen Student Union’s Café reading Art Buchwald’s column in the Paris edition Of the Herald Tribune when a careful voice coming from Just...
Is there no end to it the way they keep popping up in magazines then congregate in the drafty orphanage of a book? You would think the elm would speak up, but like the dawn it only inspires...
Manhattan Beach in Los Angeles County is part of the so-called South Bay, south of Santa Monica. It was mostly populated by middle-class white people when I grew up there in the 1950s, and was a...
On the Smolensk Road The Stukas, finished with the men and tanks, turned back for the civilians – the mile-after-mile of refugees scuffing and trundling behind the Russian retreat and...
Frank Kermode is too multifarious a writer to have anything as dogged as a theme for his critical work; too sane and stealthy to boast of anything as limiting as an obsession. But there are...
Sectarianism seldom plays any part in Scottish writing. One of the few exceptions – and the most pertinent to Liam McIlvanney’s novel – comes in Ian Rankin’s Mortal Causes...
In one of literary history’s great instances of the pot calling the kettle black, Henry James complained of ‘the absence of spontaneity, the excess of reflection’ in George...
If modernism is our antiquity, as T.J. Clark has claimed, then Barbara Guest was a devout classicist. No American poet – with the exception of John Ashbery – so reverently extended...
Ah the Raj! Our mother-incarnateVictoria Imperatrix rules the sceptredsphere as she oversees legions of maiden‘fishing fleets’ breaking the wavesfor the love of a...
Like Matisse, bending over ink and watercolour on a shut-in terrace to sketch the only wineglass on his table. Its coiled, thick stem. The row of blobs below its bowl a choker of pearls for a...
Son of Zeus, son of the thunderbolt, Iacchus the twice-born, child of the double door, Bromius the roaring god, the coming one, the vanishing one, the god who stands apart; god of frenzy and...
‘I think,’ T.S. Eliot wrote in February 1923, ‘it will take me a year or two to throw off The Waste Land and settle down and get at something better which is tormenting me by...