Search Results

“... His Buick was too wide and didn’t slow, Our wing-mirrors kissing in a Suffolk lane, No sweat, not worth the exchange of addresses. High from the rainchecking satellites England’s like a gun set on a table, Still smoking, waiting to be loaded again ...”

“... Be careful not to spill it when it pops. He’d bloody crucify me if he caught us.’ We had taken months to get to this, our first kiss a meeting of stalagmite and stalactite. The slow drip of courtship: her friend, June, interceding with letters, the intimate struggle each Friday under the Plaza’s girder of light. But here we were at last, drinking Pomagne in her parents’ double bed, Christmas Eve and the last advent-calendar door ...”

“... Was it thrup or thrip, your word for the thunderflies that came off the cornfield with the paddlesteaming combine, like wafted ashes sticking to our bodies and warning us of this: the yellowing page set alight at one corner, the burning of straw. We can see the flames rushing towards us like a lynch-mob, blood in their eye, tarring and furring, until the churn and swirl of the ploughed field-edge brings them up short as a river would yards from our door ...”

“... How would you feel if a muntjac walked in? Would you greet it as an exotic Or fret about it gnawing the fruit trees? Take your time: the answer will say as much About you as the shade of your nail polish.After that we can go on a cycle ride.I suggest you play safe and wear a helmet,But we’ll forget the hi-vis lycra –Last time it caused a panic at the pig farm ...”

“... They come each evening like virgins to a well: the girls queuing for the xerox-machine, braceleted and earmarked, shapely as pitchers in their stretch Levis or wraparound shirts, sylphs from the typing-pool bearing the forms of their masters, the chilly boardroom gods. But this one, this nervous one, is different. She doesn’t gossip with the others and pleads, when it’s her turn, no, you go first ...”

“... Horse-chestnuts thudded to the lawn each autumn. Their spiked husks were like medieval clubs, Porcupines, unexploded shells. But if You waited long enough they gave themselves up – Brown pups, a cow opening its sad eye, The shine of the dining-room table. We were famous for horse-chestnuts. Boys From the milltown would ring at our door asking Could they gather conkers and I’d to tell them Only from the ground – no stick-throwing ...”

“... Where is the man who does not feel his heart softened ... [by] these so helpless and so perfectly innocent little creatures? Cobbett When the trees have given up snowberries come into their own, winter grapes, albino settlers of the dark. With their milky blobs they lined our doorstep that November dusk we swung your basket up the gravel-path and home ...”

“... Our lives were wasted but we never knew. There was such work to be done: the watch-chains And factories, the papers to sign In the study. Surrounded by brass How could we see what we amounted to – A glint of eyes as headlights swept away? In a cot on the lawn lies my nephew, Whose name I can’t remember – the strands Of family thinner each year, though we Are here again, politely ...”

“... There are four beach huts, numbered 13 to 16, Each with net curtains and a lock. Who owns them, what happened to the first twelve, Whether there are plans for further building: There’s no one here today to help with such enquiries, The café closed up for the winter, No cars or buses in the PAY AND DISPLAY. The offshore rig is like a titan’s diving-board ...”

“... near alf a century an sin all t’flippin lot go reet down’ill.’ Then he asked who I was. ‘Morrison, eh, a name for up ere. I knew thi father well an t’ole surgery in Water Street. E did is best by Earby, wi disease an that, aye an thi mother too, deliverin bairns. Ad thi no mind to follow in their shoes? ‘Ere, ave another swig – tha’s like a ...”

“... Quels bons bras, quelle belle heure me rendront      cette région d’où viennent mes sommeils? Rimbaud This is the excitement that ends in pain. Dark names stretch for you from their seedbed, Bronze statesmen harangue the crowded squares. All week you’ve driven round the capital In a blacked-out Volvo, testing the way. What is this new air, ideas run up flagpoles, The people pressing to some grand conclusion, Not to be restrained ...”

“... Among the victims​ of Alex and his droogs in A Clockwork Orange is an author living in a country cottage. They don’t just do him over but tear up the pages of the book he has been typing out, ‘so that the writer veck started to platch like his life’s work was ruined’. The gangs in Kay Dick’s They (first published in 1977, fifteen years after Burgess’s novel) are no less brutal to anyone suspected of being creative ...”

“... sitting one gloomy afternoon in the makeshift office looking out at the starlings flocking over Blake’s grave in Bunhill Fields, and wondering what had possessed me to move. The last books pages I’d worked on at the Observer lay beside me (Ian Hamilton and Ted Hughes on the life of Sylvia Plath, Alison Lurie’s obituary of Mary McCarthy, Salman Rushdie ...”

“... No one can have been more surprised than James Fenton that In Memory of War turned out to be one of the most acclaimed books of 1982. A year ago, used to being told by reviewers that he was a ‘difficult’, even ‘esoteric’ poet, it looked as if he had decided that small publishers and little magazines were the most appropriate place for his work ...”

“... Early on​ in This Mournable Body, a skimpily dressed woman in ‘sky-high heels’ falls backwards onto muddy ground while trying to climb into a crowded Harare minibus. Nobody comes to her aid. Instead, she’s jeered at. Her offence is hubris, or what the crowd takes to be hubris: ‘Who does she think she is? Let her have it.’ Objects are thrown, misogynistic insults shouted; the dress is ripped from her body ...”