I have read (and reread) eleven of Pascal Quignard's books on my shelves and have written about him for fourteen years on this blog, probably more often than I've written about any writer except Beckett and Woolf. Yet, once read, I never retain him: no favourite passages that keep coming back, no memorised sentences. This is not a familiar problem. With De Quincey, weeks inside his prose labyrinths changed what I wanted from sentences.

'The three volumes of Green's Dictionary of Slang demonstrate the sheer scope of a lifetime of research by Jonathon Green, the leading slang lexicographer of our time. A remarkable collection of this ...

From our February / March issue, a story of crypto, romance and the eerie sense of peril one can encounter in a short taxi ride.

The novels of Ernest Hemingway, as well as most fiction of the twenties, thirties, and forties, are no longer obliged to do the technically strenuous work of establishing racial difference that we …

Galley Beggar Mail

(This is the introduction, as it were, to a short book I will shortly make available entitled Gilbert Sorrentino: An Introduction. As explained in the prologue, the book is an attempt both to intro…

To paraphrase the late, great Prodigy, there are wars going on outside no one is safe from. They are cultural, political, racial, class-based, and literal. It’s increasingly difficult to shake the fee...

Unpopular incumbent + fragmented opposition + unusual seat = unpredictable contest

Featuring Andrea Cohen, Christina Davis, Carolyn Forché, Ezra Fox, James Fraser, Sheila Gallagher, Robert Hass, Kythe Heller, Brenda Hillman, Richard Kearney, Askold Melnyczuk, John Mulrooney, Eileen ...

In his Foreword to Landscape with Landscape, written for its 2016 re-issue with Giramondo, Gerald Murnane describes his reaction to a number negative reviews that this, his fourth work and first fo…

Remembering R.F. Langley, 1938-2011

Labour cannot afford their own version of the Tory madness that paralysed politics

"...the moral richness of one of those seemingly useless, lethargic days, when our firmest convictions loosen into a pleasant languidness..."

What flew under the radar that you should know about

Peter Oborne’s recent book on Israel’s war delivers a forcefully argued indictment of Britain’s politicians and their media allies, writes Matt Gallagher

YouTube video by Edu Tanti