‘I seek, at once, both the eternal and the ephemeral.’ It’s a line from the French writer Georges Perec. Perec, you may remember, is most famous – notorious – for writing La Disparition, a whole novel without the letter E (Gilbert Adair’s virtuosic English translation is titled A Void). What fewer people know is that […]
It was strange to meet him halfway across Siberia, at a lonely town on the Amur river. He had already travelled overland some 2,600 miles from Moscow, whereas I had followed the nascent Amur on a wandering route out of Mongolia. He appeared a little studious, even when he was young, pale and lightly bearded, with an expression of faintly unreadable concern. How he was dressed
In the late summer of 1998, I flew for the first time to the American West. I went there in search of dinosaurs. Back in London, my wife was pregnant with – as it would turn out – our first daughter. Conscious that my opportunities for travel were about to narrow severely, I wanted, while […]
The first poem by Philip Larkin I can remember reading is ‘Wild Oats’, in an English lesson in Hull with Mr Grayson, to whom I am greatly indebted for introducing me to 20th-century poetry. ‘Wild Oats’, with its sense of lost romantic opportunity and the slow exhaustion of a relationship that entailed settling for less, […]
One February morning, my wife and I drove from our home near Melrose in the Scottish Borders to the hamlet of Ettrick, a journey of around twenty miles. It was a day for connoisseurs of the dreich. Sleety rain fell in sheets and a dense mist hung in the valleys. Fields were flooded and swollen […]
Nothing in the books I knew at the time reflected what I saw and felt growing up in the 1950s and early 1960s in the United States. This was before the stereotypical 1960s began in earnest, around 1963, with the Beatles and Dylan, organised protest and the demands for radical change. Until then it was an era of confusion and weirdness, unwritten about, as far as I could tell. I was a mediocre student, a loose fit in a big unruly family
Where the Danube bends at Tulcea, near the Black Sea in eastern Romania, the river divides. The main body continues along the north of the Delta towards the Black Sea, entering it near Chilia. Several miles southeast of Tulcea, the narrower section, now calling itself the Old Danube, again divides, this time into the Sulina […]
I was in my mid-twenties and just beginning work on my first book when I was invited to dinner with some older and very distinguished writers. I was excited, and a little curious as to why they would possibly be interested in me. Then an email arrived naming the restaurant. My stomach lurched at the words. […]
When asked to name the living writers he admired, the intolerable hero of Cyril Connolly’s novel The Rock Pool replied, ‘Eliot, Joyce and Norman Douglas.’ Douglas was indeed much admired between the wars, especially for his Capri novel, South Wind. Now I suppose he is little read and when mentioned in the press has the […]
In 1992, Joseph Brodsky published Watermark, a book-length essay that brings together his impressions of Venice in winter – he refused to go there in any other season – and a series of powerful and moving meditations on the writer’s vocation. A lifelong Brodsky fan, I had read Watermark several times since then, but never, until […]
William Ewart Gladstone, visiting the Bourbon kingdom of Naples in 1850–51, famously damned it as ‘the negation of God erected into a system of government’. He might have said the same, a hundred years later, about English boarding preparatory schools. With their inadequate sanitation, appalling food and draconian discipline administered by half-mad sadists, they seem, […]
We had left Tehran, heading down to the Gulf port of Bandar Abbas. I, who did none of the driving, sat in the back of our decommissioned army lorry and started to read the English translation of Marcel Proust’s failed masterpiece Jean Santeuil. Apart from Frank Herbert’s science fiction epic Dune and The Preservation of […]
I was thirty when I first went to St Petersburg (then Leningrad, of course); in thrall to Dostoevsky as a schoolboy, I learned to read him in Russian at university. I talked the talk, but had not yet walked the walk, particularly the perambulations of the murderer Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. St Petersburg in […]
The ideal beach is often assumed to be somewhere hot, with inoffensive azure waters lapping on sandy shores. That sounds nice, but the beaches I hanker after are British. I want them wild and windswept, with crashing waves, fossils and rock pools lively enough to hold the attention of David Attenborough. The preference comes from […]
Some years ago, I rode a bus north from Rio to Bahia, a journey of a thousand long miles and thirty long hours, through blue mountains, dusty air and the Sertão, that region menaced by poverty and afflicted by droughts that last years. I was reading Moritz Thomsen’s account of the same journey, made in […]
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Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm