Literature & Criticism

The title, Switzy, is a flippant nickname for Switzerland, a place like old age: snow-topped, dim and cold. Emma Cline’s novel hums with luxury: the private plane, the voguish hotels and restaurants,...

Fredric Jameson seemed to me to have read absolutely everything. He was the very antithesis of the intellectual type I think of as an empty theoriser, by which I mean someone who endlessly conjectures...

Luke Kennard’s Black Bag spans several genres while not belonging to any of them. It’s not quite a campus novel but has things to say about what it’s like to teach at a university. It’s...

In storm, the rain drives hard into the choppy canals –churning them white against this glittering grey.The lagoon, no longer black and flat, seems part of the rainand splashes back all day,...

Alexander Pope’s works are full of the voices and characters of other people, friends and enemies, the living and the dead, and his writings are intensely committed to ideas of companionship and...

With its crude Courier typeface, Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts was the publishing equivalent of a punk 7-inch single – spontaneous and scabrous, capturing the raw energy of the moment. Or, to...

Hoopoe is the thingWith feathers, and a crest,Or else a thing with feathers,Striped wings, and tawny breast.*(I never saw a hoopoe –Unless I was alone –Except some interloperTook out...

We are left, a third of the way through The Disappearers, with a feeling of absolute outrage, when outrage is no more than anger in the key of helplessness. Outrage leads nowhere; violence freezes time...

Literary criticism is a supremely occasional skill, where you have to be bold enough to operate where there aren’t any clear rules and make up your own, and decide for yourself what you think, and...

In Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch it isn’t only the author but his characters who can change history. Iris and Geoff learn of a portal that was discovered by a 17th-century alchemist, Hieronymus...

door in the cloudsor was it a holesmall bird on the scotch pine’s branchnorth wind, thundera raspberry summerthe thrushes are backthe flooded cityawash in insurerswho’s getting...

A thread of light travelled through the beadWith the map of the world on it.No one’s keeping the plot I said.The marriage plot, man versusWilderness plot – there are more,But I forget....

In February​ 1840, Alfred Tennyson was in a bad way, argumentative and restless. Thomas Carlyle, whose own public career was taking off, doubted how far Tennyson would rise: ‘He is often unwell;...

Quite naturally, as with any truly original writer, one had to learn how to read Firbank. A certain clue-seeking and backtracking habit was necessary, and part of the fun. The truth dawns on you, and...

so how’s it going with the Parkinson’s? you say and I startto say every moment bleeding to death around me but thetherapist cautioned me yesterday don’t say dread call...

For Stewart, this is what poetic process is: the closely observed emergence of empirical knowledge out of chaos, confusion, darkness. But she is not only a theorist; she has always alternated books of...

Joyce stands out​ among the great modernist writers for his belief in tolerance, equality, democracy, progress and the preciousness of the everyday. If he is outrageously experimental, he is also...

‘What’s the point of an alien artefact you can recognise?’ Harrison asked in Wish I Was Here. ‘As a branch of the fantastic, science fiction should accept that its currency is...