In the summer of 1942, the Polish poet Władysław Szlengel made a detour into light verse with ‘The Passports’: ‘I would like to have a Uruguayan passport/ Oh, what a beautiful land it is/ How nice it must feel to be the subject/ Of the land called Uruguay…’ Successive quatrains hymned the joys of Paraguayan,
It is very possible that Peter Kemp is the best-read man in Britain. Certainly, as the Sunday Times’s chief literary critic for goodness knows how many years, he has read and opined upon more works of new fiction than most. His is either a dream job or an absolute nightmare, depending on how you feel
All writers studying their craft should be encouraged to try translation, thinks Idra Novey, the Pennsylvania-born novelist, poet and, si, translator. Working in another language confers the freedom to slip out of their own voices, developing their own tone in the process, she told one interviewer. On the strength of Novey’s third novel, Take What
In the light of recent fire emergencies on the Greek islands and in the wider Mediterranean, this book has just acquired even more relevance. It centres on another catastrophe in May 2016, a Canadian inferno nicknamed the ‘Beast’, which has become the most expensive natural disaster in the country’s history. Within three weeks, Fort McMurray’s
In this frustrating book, Tomiwa Owolade sets out to establish that American attempts to identify and deal with issues of race are irrelevant to those of Britain. His basic case is that even if it might exist in America, structural racism based on colour is not found in Britain, and he criticises a significant number
Andrew Martin is in love. Head over heels in love, quite unable to control himself in his appreciation of the object of his affection, which is, believe it or not, an underground railway network. While this may seem an irrational attachment, it becomes easier to understand as his account of the origins, history and, most
There are lots of reasons why non-scientists should be forced to study mathematics, but it’s hard to see why mathematicians should bother with literature. Literature is part of the entertainment industry: emotional manipulation, crippled by cheap assertions and hollow arguments. Maths is intellectual. Maths has rigorous standards. Literature hides guff under its pretty phrases. Hart
Here is the opening of a sonnet written by Wilfred Owen in the spring of 1911: ‘Three colours have I known the Deep to wear;/ ’Tis well today that Purple grandeurs gloom.’ Owen was 18 and had just been on a pilgrimage to Teignmouth in Devon, where his hero John Keats had once stayed. The
‘What am I – I wonder, dear god – now best known for?’ It is a question asked at the end of ‘Gladly!’, one of the American author Diane Williams’s mercurial, light-footed short stories. The narrator in existential crisis has just bumped into a man she ‘once engaged with for years, amid scenes of nearly
Oh Ed, Ed, Ed, Ed. You have written a magnificent tome, but I am so conflicted about it. Party Lines is more than 400 pages: a quote from Goethe at the start, a lengthy introduction, plus a glossary and an index. But we get into semantics from the beginning. What is dance music now? Practically
We might be twins, Catherine Taylor and I. We were both girls growing up in Yorkshire in the same decades – I in the West Riding (where an alley is a ‘ginnel’), her in the south (where it’s a ‘gennel’). We are children of the Yorkshire Ripper years, conditioned to be constantly scared of the
Many of the best literary children – think the creations of Henry James or Elizabeth Bowen – have something creepy about them. These are girls and boys who see through the hypocrisy of adults, and there’s going to be something unnerving about their precocity. Jean Stafford’s Mollie and Ralph took their place in a lineage
The most impressive banknote I have ever seen is the 500 ruble note produced by the Imperial Bank of Russia between 1905 and 1912. About four times the size of a modern £50 note, it is magnificently emblazoned with a portrait of Peter the Great and a profusion of cupids and classical pillars. It looks
Dante travels through the circles of Hell, guided by Virgil. At the summit of the mountain of Purgatory, Virgil abandons him, leaving him with Beatrice, the woman Dante loved. With Beatrice’s smile, Dante is transported to Paradise, experiencing astral bliss as he soars through the cosmos. But Beatrice must leave him at the approach to
‘The world might condemn me, but what’s the world? A gathering of fools and a pile of prejudices.’ Thus, with all the certainty and absolutism of youth, does the 17-year-old Ariane reflect on the prospect of selling herself. There would be an element of épater les bourgeois in this sentiment in almost any age, but
The other day, John Simpson, He Who Cannot Be Removed From The BBC, tweeted something purportedly about Volodymyr Zelensky. What it was really about, though, was John Simpson – how many world leaders he had interviewed (200), over how long (more than 50 years), and who he most admired (Zelensky, Nelson Mandela and Vaclav Havel).
To give us a sense of precisely how blind Selina Mills is she asks us to cover our right eye completely with our right hand and put a fist up in front of our left eye, so it blocks our central sight. ‘Now imagine the remaining sight is murky and blurry, as if covered in
What should we make of present-day Belfast and its compelling, fractious backstory? English visitors have long found the city invigorating, confusing or exasperating – often all three – but undeniably characterful. Philip Larkin, who lived there for five years in the 1950s, noted its ‘draughty streets, end-on to hills, the faint/Archaic smell of dockland’ and
Feminism? Pfft! Marianne Faithfull practically spat the word at me when I interviewed her in 2017. Then she rowed back, conceding that she’d spent most of her life ‘standing up for women’s rights… I’ve had to.’ Pallenberg humilated, seduced, empowered, educated, bonded and divided the band as the whim took her In chronic pain with
It was a vision that President Woodrow Wilson could not resist. The Treaty of Versailles, and the League of Nations founded during the negotiations, were meant not just to end the first world war but all future wars by ensuring that a country taking up arms against one signatory would be treated as a belligerent