April 2018

Upon reaching the foot of a rocky cliff, a travelling hare saw that a goat was readying to climb up its face, and said to him: “O goat, I see how your long horns, that curve and point forwards

This building in Warwick, now a venue for wedding ceremonies, has the distinction of being the only place where Larkin had to drudge. In 1942, his second year at Oxford, the ground floor was the Fuel Office, and he took a summer job there which he hated.

The Olguita Marina drink on the menu had a beautiful name, and beauty makes me curious. I didn’t order it since I was informed that in addition to rum it contained three fruit liquors, of which two were strawberry and passionfruit.

The term ‘postmodernism’ may no longer seem to tell us much about the present.

As one in a sea of some twelve-thousand writers, able to attend perhaps fifteen of five-hundred-plus panels, presentations, readings and receptions, the Berfrois correspondent was highly aware of the need to acknowledge his smallness...

Everyone had died – not that you’d know it, from how they were laughing about their poor choices and bad rolls of the dice. As a social anthropologist, I study how people understand artificial intelligence...

West Ham fans tend to think that what happens at their club says something about the state of English football. It’s an illusion born of a summer afternoon 52 years ago...

Like a lot of black girls coming of age in the final years of the 20th century, I had an adolescent fascination with Prince.

Hawa, a Hindi word for wind or air, carries a subtler meaning in Indian politics. A politician’s hawa is the tailwind that propels him to victory; it is the superior momentum that comes with being on a roll.

This morning I am thinking about how intimacy often manifests itself through absence. That is, I learned more about the similarities I shared with my mother after she died...

When it comes to interior shots of Edith Sitwell houses, this blog certainly spoils its readers. This is the room in which she was born in 1887, currently the offices of the lively Scarborough-based Valley Press.

A child must say to her playmate, “I love you as I would a timber marmot, because your house is sturdy and filled with hallways. I love you as I would a polar razorback, because your bristly coat matches the driven snow.

Spark’s novels – 22 in all – are the product of a ruthlessly confident, even clairvoyant sensibility, and fuse an impossible range of tones and strengths.

Ten years ago, Barbara Ehrenreich read an article in Scientific American that shook her to the core. Its argument was that the body’s immune system, far from protecting us, can enable the growth and spread of tumours...

That violación. Not enough pages in the world to describe what it did to me. The whole planet could be my inkstand and it still wouldn’t be enough.

Orbán has named his reign the Regime of National Cooperation. This expression well defines the expectations towards anyone who wishes to survive in this environment: either you collaborate or you are declared an enemy of the state.