Literature & Criticism

Beyond the range of the dog, I knew there were snaky corridors at Meara’s, as well as a door that leads to a garden with the big round pond, which is a big surprise in summer, presenting its...

If Invisible Man risked a too easy transcending of the pain it described, fulfilling one half of the ‘tragicomic’ or ‘blues’ formula but stinting on the other, Ralph Ellison’s...

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,...

Shelagh Delaney had written A Taste of Honey when she was nineteen; it took her ten days. It was staged by Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop in 1958 and filmed by Tony Richardson in 1961. She had...

Clare was born in 1793 in the village of Helpston in Northamptonshire. When the bookseller Ned Drury met him in 1819, he immediately saw an opportunity to market him as a ‘peasant poet’. Describing...

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...

There is a less binary way of thinking about the real and the imaginary and we slip into it (perhaps without knowing) as soon as we start to read almost any novel by Zola. Crudely evoked, the movement...

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;...