As this country stumbles towards a Labour victory at the next election, the mood on the left remains subdued. The problem is not Keir Starmer’s personal charisma, achingly absent though that may be. No, it lies much deeper than that, in what Tony Benn liked to call the ishoos. The cry goes up from focus
Now the exhilaration kicks in, the lightness of heart, a joyfulness surging along the warmed blood vessels and tingling extremities: every cell feels as if charged with new life. There has been a ritual, a sacrifice, an offering to the waves of flesh and pain, and in return, there is restoration, life given back. Thus
Shy concludes Max Porter’s informal trilogy of short, poetic novels powered by pain and polyphony. First, in 2015, came Grief is the Thing with Feathers, in which a widowed Ted Hughes scholar is both shocked and comforted by the arrival of a croaking, crouching crow. Then, four years later, Lanny, which followed a young boy
If you’re looking for a towering intellect to dispense guidance and illumination on current events, particularly one from Central Europe, the hearth of gravitas, piano sonatas, polyglotism, the reading of Hegel etc, Milan Kundera, in A Kidnapped West, will be a bit of a disappointment. This isn’t Kundera’s fault. The volume contains a short speech
Early American settlers said that a squirrel could climb up a tree on the coast of Massachusetts, set off westwards and not touch the ground until it reached the Ohio river. The squirrels, like the Native Americans, were pushed out and west. Timber was the settlers’ main resource, and they stripped New England of wood
In the wake of the death of her mother, divorce from her husband and the loss of custody of her son, a young writer and poet in Seoul turns her attentions to lessons in ancient Greek. She walks miles across the city to the classroom, dressed in a black jacket, black scarf and black shirt
