Jamie McKendrick

We that have been hunting all the day are mighty tired, our hair is dank with sweat and by our hunting helmets plastered flat.

As days of hunting go, this must be counted a good day: the horns blew loud and the dogs barked hard as though they knew it was more for them

than us we went out hunting the wild beast all day – so they could teach him just how tame they were, and how wrong to...

Toledo la rica, Salamanca la fuerte, León la bella, Oviedo la sacra, y Sevilla la grande.

Liverpool the impoverished, the liverish, the void, the full, the self-besotted, the blarney-argoted, the blitzed and blackened, the bella-brutta, the rag-rich, the moss-stained sandstoned, the green-lung’d, the ricket-ridden, the loud and adenoidal.

Liverpool the last-to-be-served, the...

Out in the vacant lot to gather weeds I found these teazles – their ovoid heads delicately armoured with crowns of thorns. Arthur, from whom I haven’t heard a word in thirty years, who must be ninety if he’s a day, told me they were used to raise the nap on the green felt of billiards tables and, since Roman times, for combing woollen stuff. He also said their seeds were...

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 yet no toil constrained by want’. But eternity is a fair stretch: over millennia, any activity might begin to pall. The 19th-century Roman dialect poet Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli claims in his...

Red-eyed and flinching, Flavius was applying a depilatory paste of ivy gum and crushed centipede to little effect. The sudden silence meant they were waiting for that smooth-cheeked decemvir to swivel his thumb over in the arena. Brats of empire – they’d think the world revolved around them if they thought the world revolved which of course it doesn’t. It stays put or gets...