A Little Life seems to be the favourite to win the 2015 Booker Prize. But before allowing it to be celebrated as the great gay American novel everyone’s been waiting for (as some have), the following observations may be relevant.. Jude, abandoned as a newborn, grows up in care and is serially sexually abused by Read More
Robert Crawford’s biography is probably the best account so far of how The Waste Land came to be written, and what resources it drew upon. This is not to treat the poem teleologically, as though Eliot had always been working towards it. Rather, the biography simply acknowledges (not least by its subtitle) that Eliot would Read More
The sea has reversed its name. It will return; but for now, withdraws to its dreaming pool, and leaves things alone. All night it heeds the moon’s rhetoric, the suasive darkness heavy from above and from below. Its heart is grave and has depth and breadth to think of, remembering a time when, unpopulated, it Read More