In different ways, most of Ian McEwan’s novels and stories are about trauma and contingency, and he is now best known as the great contemporary stager of traumatic contingency as it strikes...
It was Thursday and the skeletons were out dancing as was their custom in the beetroot and the wintry sun shone down on their fragile paleness and the earth crunched under bony feet. No film made...
Civil war is an unpleasant business and the story that unfolds in the letters and diaries of Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie, the Canadian diplomat with whom she was in love for more than...
There’s nothing like a book about music to remind the reader of the silence. Nothing else insists so emphatically on what we are usually happy to forget: that, during the hours we read, our...
The Chorus draws nearer to Oedipus. CHORUS Those evil men that have slept since long ago. It is not proper to awaken them. But yet I must be told – OEDIPUS Told what? CHORUS Told of that...
Fred Vargas is a woman. Said to be the sixth best-selling author in France, she is unusual there in being a female crime writer, in contrast with women’s dominance of the genre in Britain....
‘I have often had a fancy,’ G.K. Chesterton wrote in his book Orthodoxy (1908), ‘for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and...
Edward FitzGerald transfused his own life, even as he deemed it a paltry thing, into the persona of Omar Khayyám, who would lift it from that paltriness and transfigure him. He was able to formulate through...
What do humans do in heaven? Not too much, though not too little, according to St Augustine, who foresees ‘leisure for the praises of God’ with ‘no inactivity of idleness, and...
Over the winter, you may have seen posters for a movie, certificate 12A (‘moderate fantasy violence and horror . . . limited bloody images’): a bunch of teenagers,...
The late Bernard Crick, who had a fine and memorable funeral in Edinburgh the other day, left a legacy of sharp opinions behind him. Among the least popular was his opinion of the British...
A few summers ago, I sat in on lectures at the Sorbonne, where it seemed to be the fashion for the lecturers to talk in metaphors. Beckett’s prose was a snowball rolling down a mountain:...
In Florence in 1348, shortly after two of its biggest banks collapsed because the English king had defaulted on a loan, roughly two-thirds of the population died of the Black Death. Egg-shaped...
The Hammock Your book is Summer by Edith Wharton. A smell off the garden of something becoming inedible. Between sleeping and waking, no real difference at all. There’s music in this, there...
Hofmannsthal’s is a reputation in abeyance, and I am content that it should be so. There is a limit to how far it can fall – though in the English Sprachraum it was perhaps never all...
Over the course of his 43-year, 16-novel writing career, Barry Unsworth has demonstrated a considerable knack for producing historical novels of timely pertinence. In 1992, for example, the year...
Giant Sable Antelope Would Like a Word with History At night the savannah comes to claim me. Thirty females and their calves in search of a leader. Shaggy manes down each nape. White cheeks and...
In the first volume of his Coleridge biography, Richard Holmes describes Coleridge and Dorothy and William Wordsworth working ‘like plein-air painters, taking elaborate notes on the varied...