[Ibykos fr. 286, Poetae Melici Graeci]

In spring, on the one hand, the Kydonian apple trees, being watered by streams of rivers where the uncut garden of the maidens [is] and vine blossoms...

From the simple question of the quality of reportage through the central problem of footballing professionalism to the downright philosophical challenges which peaks of human endeavour (any peak,...

The Möbius strip is well-known to topologists and to those fond of performing simple party tricks. By twisting a strip of paper through 180° before pasting its ends together, you can...

Our history of giving up – that is to say, our attitude towards it, our obsession with it, our disavowal of its significance – may be a clue to something we should really call our histories and not our selves. It is a clue to the beliefs, the sentences, around which we have organised ourselves. If giving up tends to be the catastrophe to be averted, what do we imagine giving up is actually like?

I am not interested in slumming, in showing off about my naughty hobbit habit. The idea of slumming is an attempt to negotiate a deal between the secret shameful self who just wants to gobble, gobble, gobble and an acceptable adult dinner-party persona. All of us were children once, and that should be enough.

There were giant-killers in those days. Storm Jameson, rallying English writers in defence of peace and collective security, had to toss up to decide between Rebecca West and Rose Macaulay for...

Aharon Appelfeld lives a few miles west of Jerusalem in a maze-like conglomeration of attractive stone dwellings directly next to an ‘absorption centre’, where immigrants are...

‘Reading others people’s letters, like reading private diaries, offers thrilling and unexpected glimpses into the lives of others,’ claims the dustjacket of The Oxford Book of...

‘I dislike the cult of dreams,’ Sarah Ferguson declares. ‘They should be secret things, and people who are always telling you of what they have dreamt irritate me. Nor do I like...

I’ve kept a sporadic diary for about ten years. Besides the occasional incident that seems worth recording, I put down gossip and notes on work and reading. These are some extracts from last year. London is Camden Town and Yorkshire a small village in Craven to which my parents retired, and where I still have a house.

The very question of where Kafka belongs is already something of a scandal given the fact that the writing charts the vicissitudes of non-belonging, or of belonging too much. Remember: he broke every engagement he ever had, he never owned an apartment, and he asked his literary executor to destroy his papers, after which that contractual relation was to have ended.

His name was Franz Kafka, and he quite often went to the movies. Some such statement constitutes both the basis of Kafka Goes to the Movies and its primary impediment: the rock it has to roll up...

Stanisław Lem was incommensurable – to SF, to literature, to himself. He was so many different writers – five, at least. I had too much to read. I risked missing the centenary in mute tribute.

The other wall, the mote famous and aesthetically more distinguished one, the one designed to protect China from the barbarians, inspired Kafka to one of his most profound reflections: ‘Try...

I.

At 8.46 p.m. at Rudower Höhe, the sentry sneezed and a West Berlin customs officer shouted back: ‘Gesundheit!’

At 11.40 a.m. at the Kiesberg sentry post, three West Berlin...