Bringing Memories

Claude McKay offered in Harlem Shadows a genuinely new sensibility in African American and Black Caribbean arts...
Read MoreThus Saith the Rhino

‘And’ is superfluous, omissible. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the regulated couplets of Tang poetry...
Read MoreOrwell’s Perfect Boozer

My favourite public-house, the Moon Under Water, is only two minutes from a bus stop, but it is on a side-street...
Read MoreSusan Daitch on Natan Mendelson, Jef de Wulf and Mazarin

Where do you put that memory as you sit in a café in Dizengoff Street, when it taps you on the shoulder and asks if this seat is taken?
Read MoreWit, Sarcasm, Satire

The Dud Avocado follows the period young Sally Gorce chooses an expat existence in Paris over college...
Read MoreChawles and the Cormorants by A. Conan Doyle, M.B., C.M.

With these impedimenta carefully corded up in a strong deal box I felt myself equal to any photographic emergency...
Read MoreLiterature Direct Publishing

Unlike the ancient Odyssey or the modernist Ulysses, the epic work that is Amazon delivers immediate gratification to all customers...
Read MoreLe Carré was not part of the literary bureaucracy…

John le Carré became a diligent student of nineteenth-century German literature. He was recruited by the British Secret Intelligence Service while at Oxford...
Read MoreAndre Gerard’s Sleuthing Delights

The biggest delight of my Conan Doyle sleuthing may well be a false clue, even if the facts are not in doubt...
Read MoreAwash With Forgeries

The art work in fiction is less likely to be the basis for some epiphany than to be a MacGuffin...
Read More“Play that thing, Jazz band!”

To experience a version of the cool exhilaration of a mid-twentieth-century American jazz night, one might start by listening to an iconic Miles Davis recording...
Read MoreThe tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
Read MoreThe thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
Read MoreI spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
Read MoreThe tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
Read MoreThe thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
Read MoreI spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
Read More