I say: see, yellow is fast, / and yellow is the colour of the sun, / it is the body of the flames, orange / is the colour of the sun, it is the body / of flames.
On the night of 4 February 1983, Klaus Barbie was sitting on the cold metal floor of a transport aircraft. Kidnapped in Bolivia, the former head of the Gestapo in Lyon was being flown back to...
There was no shortage of bastards in the early 16th century, but Thomas Cromwell stands out as one of the biggest bastards of them all. His surviving correspondence shows the energy, efficiency...
Sky before dawn is blackish green. Perhaps a sign. I should learn more about signs. Turning a corner to the harbour the wind hits me a punch in the face. I always walk in the morning, I...
Two Ornithology Variations I It’s OK that the material world is tenuous. However, I must remind myself to ‘grab it by the shoulders’ and ‘give it a shake’ in case it...
The Cambridge Edition of Jane Austen is a production on the most monumental scale, involving nine beautiful but heavy volumes and something like a dozen editors, with a powerful editorial board...
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:...