Geoff Dyer is known for his stylish sentences and diverse subject matter. He has written fiction, nonfiction and essays. He’s ...

All Mrs. Woolf’s fiction shows such an instinct for experiment that we may have to show cause why this new book should be called peculiarly experimental. “Jacob’s Room”, too, was an adventure. But ...

In her introduction to The Selected James Simmons (1978), Edna Longley said that in Simmons’s poetry “art and life never look like becoming polite strangers”. He regarded Yeats’s insistence that a ...

191pp. University of California Press. Paperback, £30 (US $34.95). Each spring, I teach a class on the Achaemenid Persian Empire. We spend the first few weeks looking at some very big stuff indeed – ...

In the title story of Diabelli – a collection of short fiction by the Swiss writer Hermann Burger (1942–89), first published in 1979 – a washed-up prestidigitator describes the linguistic traits ...

If I’m walking to work, I usually take the shortcut to the station through the old city cemetery: overgrown, semi-derelict, a lot of brambles, and Elizas (“Wife of the Above”), generations of families ...

What does a burial imply? Consider a simple inhumation, the slender body of the departed laid in a shallow pit by his former companions and covered with dirt. This sort of burial reveals a pragmatic ...

A Jamaican poet and Oxford-educated academic who lives in Leeds and teaches in Manchester, Jason Allen-Paisant won, in 2023, the T. S. Eliot and Forward prizes for Self-Portrait as Othello – a ...

On April 20, 1934, an eight-year-old girl in Aberdeen, Helen Priestly, went to buy her mother some bread and never came home. The police, believing her to have been seen boarding a tram in the company ...