Fiona Pitt-Kethley has published more than twenty books of prose and poetry.
My first years were haunted by foreign names, phrases like ‘apostolical succession’ and strange invasions of dressed-up prelates. After a quick ordination, blessing or what have you in the chapel, they’d go out the back to take their photographs. (I liked the geometry of our garden – first, the square washing-line that wouldn’t spin, then...
Pencil is less ambiguous than paint, incising hard lines round the genitals. I’ve seen art-students, broad-minded enough to talk naturally to naked models in their breaks from posing, become furtive as they draw a penis – men too. Often, like children cheating in exams, one hand shielded the other’s workings from all view. Others erased madly –...
Five years ago I applied to the Film Artistes’ Association – the union for extras – in an attempt to find a way of funding my writing. I needed a job that didn’t take all my time and yet paid well. Prostitution had crossed my mind – I expect most women fantasise about that – but the memory of a foreign student and patron of tarts whom I’d once taught...
In Acton, the Public Baths’ attendant was not the lifeguard type you might expect. You’d see his fishy, chlorinated eyes above the doors. He’d got it to an art – parading past the cubicles, checking the locks still worked, peering at ground level for extra pairs of feet.
A serious few entered with a low dive, thrusting forward, their heads in wrinkled caps, their...
A Hollywood actress who’d come to stay with a born-again film extra in Richmond asked where she could pay for sex in London. On being told that there was no such place, she asked: ‘How do you manage then?’
The answer is – we manage badly. Free sex is something like the NHS – months to get down to it with some coy types. And all the details that you...
There are really only two things people want to keep from public scrutiny: their real, private self; or the fact that they have no private self of any particular interest. Now, my instinctive...
Fiona Pitt-Kethley’s favourite novel is a 16th-century Chinese work called Chin P’ing Mei. This book, she believes, was written as an act of vengeance. The author imbued each of the...
Richard Rayner's new novel, his second, opens with a nervous exhibition of rhetorical trills and twitches, buttonholing the reader like a stand-up comic on his first night: ...
Most books offered as poetry never leave the condition of prose – which is not to say they are good prose. But when a prose voice enters poetry, it can clear and freshen the air. Beside...
Almost every woman I know has at one time or another been to bed with a man she shouldn’t have been to bed with – a married man, a friend’s man or, quite simply, a man who...
So characteristic of Paul Muldoon’s poetry as to be almost a hallmark is the moment, unnerving and exciting in about equal measures, when his speaker is suddenly revealed to himself as...
Amy Clampitt is a most spirited and exhilarating performer. An enormous appetite for observation and zeal to describe precisely what she has observed are transmitted through both the best and the...
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