Blake Morrison is the author of the memoirs When Did You Last See Your Father? and Two Sisters.
The theft in Theft isn’t a theft at all. Badar, working as a servant boy in a house in Dar es Salaam in the 1990s, is accused of adding groceries to the household’s weekly bill and selling them to accomplices. Nothing about Badar suggests he’d be capable of such a crime, and Haji and Raya, his affable master and mistress (terms they reject: ‘What is this Bwana
The mouse plague in Queensland and New South Wales in 2020-21 was overshadowed by Covid-19. But the plague within the plague was no small matter. Heavy rain after a long drought meant bumper grain crops, which colonies of mice devastated. The use of poison (zinc phosphide coated on wheat and scattered around pastures) had little effect: there were always more mice. Residents suffered no
Kunle is a law student in Lagos with little grasp of what’s happening in the country. When his uncle asks, ‘You have heard that there is war in Eastern Region, abi?’ he shakes his head. He’s a lonely, ‘hermitic’ sort of boy. Since his transistor radio ran out of batteries, he hasn’t kept up with current events. Now term is over there’s no
Novelists don’t usually care for screen adaptations of their work. But the film versions of Atonement, The Remains of the Day and The English Patient do no great disservice to the books. And Colm Tóibín wasn’t unhappy with Nick Hornby’s screenplay for Brooklyn, despite two big changes to the ending. In the novel, when the insidious Enniscorthy shopkeeper Miss
The success of Paul Harding’s first novel, Tinkers (2009), is the kind of good luck story worth passing on to any dispirited author. When Cold Water Flat, the band he drummed with in the 1990s, broke up after touring the US and Europe, he studied creative writing at the University of Iowa, under the tutelage of (among others) Marilynne Robinson. The novel he spent the next decade
Towards the end of And When Did You Last See your Father? (1993), Blake Morrison says:Stand them up against grief, and even the greatest poems, the greatest paintings, the greatest novels
Blake Morrison begins his account of the murder of James Bulger with a delicate diversion into the story of the Children’s Crusade. The year 1212: at Saint-Denis, a boy of 12 begins to
It’s a race against time, but, as this century totters to its close, we might, in the final few years, catch up with the arithmetic and discover that it’s the 20th century we’ve
In 1972 the final issue of Ian Hamilton’s Review was given over to a symposium on ‘The State of Poetry’. Only fifteen years on, it has the flavour of a yellowed historical
The Great War was the war of the great war poets. Was ‘the war to end all wars’ also the war to end all war poetry? The best part of Jon Stallworthy’s introduction to his Oxford
‘New’ poetry can mean two things. When Ezra Pound said ‘make it new’ he was willing the advent of Modernism, the birth of a consciousness transformed by the
It is a current preoccupation on the Left, more fashionable now among many students of English than Post-Structuralism, that English Literature as an academic subject is a conspiracy of the
It seemed to be happening only yesterday, but Blake Morrison was born in 1950, and for him the Movement is something you have to work on in a library. So it suddenly comes to seem rather remote
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