Alessandro Manzoni was born in 1785, the only child of an arranged marriage between Giulia Beccaria, daughter of the Milanese intellectual Cesare Beccaria, and Pietro Manzoni, a minor nobleman....
The most common complaint about Dickens in his lifetime was that he exaggerated, that his characters were implausible specimens of humanity. Prince, too, was seen as going far beyond the norm, especially...
The laconic riposte is a pivot or judo throw that makes use of an opponent’s superior weight and strength in order to tip them off-balance. Helen DeWitt has been talking in laconic for quite a while...
Everyone who knew G.K. Chesterton loved him for his kindliness and jollity, as well as the dazzling turns of phrase and the forensic psychology of the Father Brown stories. Chesterton adapted his detective’s...
Roald Dahl’s style – Hemingway for kids with added wrinkles and twinkles and lashings of chocolate, a splash of Belloc here and a glug of Lewis Carroll there, with the odd word like ‘fizzwangle’...
Nona Fernández was two years old in 1973, when a military junta overthrew Salvador Allende’s government. Like the narrator of The Twilight Zone, she spent her childhood oblivious to the murderous policies...
If you were to make a film of Gu Byeong-mo’s The Old Woman with the Knife, you’d need a lot of extras. In the novel’s public spaces, no one does anything remotely out of the...
One of the most important functions of an education in a humanities subject is to introduce students to worlds that are different from the one they think they know, and chronological and cultural distance...
When I try to remember what attracted me to The Daughter of Time when I was fifteen, I think it was probably this: Inspector Grant’s self-possession, his irony and savoir faire – and the hints of romantic...
Come, gin, you sharp-tongued thing, and sitwith me for the daily briefing. Out he slides,the ruffled slug, flanked by his advisers. He’s notquite not grinning. The three podiums are dominoes
Kafka’s language is extraordinarily plain and lucid – far more so than that of any other modern writer – but still full of mystery. We can be fairly sure that he is not quite saying what he seems...
Elizabeth Hardwick had a great command of pattern and some of her characterisations jingle like a good ad: Frost was ‘malicious and capricious’; New York, a ‘restless monster of possibility and liability’;...
Why is George Sanders’s work – winner of the Booker Prize, lauded in every conceivable quarter – still attended by the scent of failure? It must be, in order that he can overcome. At some point,...
here she comes, the Pythiacrabbed hands fusedto a narrow pair of follicles[of no precise origin]halts at the side of the gorgecramps over her swollen abdomen –her floral tube vomiting blood
Joan Didion understood the impression she made and knew how to use it. ‘My only advantage as a reporter,’ she wrote in the introduction to Slouching towards Bethlehem, ‘is that I am so physically...
Frank O’Hara wasn’t a poet to write about parents, siblings and a middle-class Irish-Catholic upbringing in Grafton, Massachusetts, or his military service in the Pacific during the Second World War....
On Percival Everett is routinely described as underrated or overlooked, an outsider, the creator of a body of work too eccentric or discomfiting or higgledy-piggledy to attract a readership, or retain...
Solomon’s SealShaded by the self-seeded hazelsIn a back corner of our garden,To the right of the flowering currantAn unexpected Solomon’s sealI want to show you. Does it matterWhy such...