One afternoon in June 1962 Octavio Paz and I, until then only acquainted through letters, met at the studio of the painter Juan Soriano in Mexico City. From there we went walking down Paseo de la...
One Saturday some years ago, while cycling over Wearmouth Bridge in the centre of Sunderland, my young daughters and I got mixed up with the football crowd. ‘There’s that MP,’...
Harold Bloom, who died at the age of 89 just before the publication of The American Canon, made his name in 1973 with The Anxiety of Influence. It was a great title, which soon became a...
As we glide along the path of our own destruction, this is how we normalise it – one tweet at a time.
How can a girl believe in an institution that asks her to gather blackmail material to make it easier for her country to begin an illegal war? How can a girl believe in a government that asks its people...
Whether Hitler gets into our minds, or we mislay something of our own inside his, it’s clear that this strange and hateful man, who has been dead for 74 years, is still messing with our heads.
While his men were getting into position, he noticed that something was blocking the elevation of the machine gun on the front of his armoured car. He got out to fix it, taking the opportunity to ‘seize...
Bears, we have been led to believe, are super-cuddly – right up until the moment when they rip your throat out.’
When David Jones refers to the predicament of persons of Welsh affinity ‘whose “medium” is English’, his use of the word hovers over its painterly sense, as though a choice were involved. But the...
‘It’s a disgusting case – her face lights up whenever that animated little deformity so much as turns to her.’ This was Diana Manners, writing to her fiancé, Duff...
Last year, I spoke to a young female doctor who has on occasion been sexually assaulted or insulted by men under her care. What are they thinking? One answer is that they think she is a nurse...
David Ben-Gurion, the founder of the state of Israel, was brooding, explosive, often on the verge of collapse: every obstacle he faced was a ‘catastrophe’. He dabbled in...
Arguing about Sontag is one of the things that keeps her alive for us, as a figure of contention. We may end up arguing about her longer than we continue reading her, but that’s for posterity to decide.
Cameron says of his time in government: ‘We proved in an increasingly polarised age that politics wasn’t either/or – you could be pro-defence and pro-aid; pro-family and pro-equality; pro-public...
A typical Chinese millennial hipster will turn up to see you wearing a snug designer jacket, really saggy jeans or super-tight leggings, and white sneakers. They’ll be carrying an...
Out of the shuddering car and into the dance. The holy medallion is still swinging like a hanged Disneyland midget in a gale. The eyes of the skull knob on the gearstick pulse dangerously. The...
After he left school, his father took a piece of sculpture – a sandstone horse, almost two feet high, ‘three legs serving convincingly as four’ – that Lucian had made, to show to the Central School...
In 1882, the year Virginia Woolf and William Carlos Williams were born, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter, a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball. It wasn’t as good as a Remington but it...