The American writer James Salter, in a piece entitled “Michelin Man” collected in the volume Eat Memory: Great Writers at the Table, traces his first connection with French food to the New York World’s Fair in 1939, which featured a restaurant at the French pavilion that everyone talked about but where few managed to get a…
Evelyn Waugh went to Abyssinia as a war reporter in 1935, where he mostly missed the war but thought the Italians were doing a good job of spreading civilisation in darkest Africa.
The young poet arrived in Ulster’s capital in 1950 and soon got his first glimpse of the province’s great tradition of sectarian politics.
Michael Fassbender and Colin Firth are to join forces in a new film which will show the true glamour and romance inherent in the job of changing words on a page.
Claudio Magris’s account of a stubborn chronicler of the copious inconvenience of living.
Beware of poets’ mere opinions or opinionating, writes David Wheatley. Many construct whole personae to this end, while secretly defying the reader to see them awry, in an entirely different light.
Tim Parks asks if the power of global literary models, particularly in fiction, can have harmful effects on personal and national self-expression.
Philip Roth’s French interview announcing the end of his writing career has just been published in English.
Robert McCrum remembers the old world of publishing and bookselling, writers, printers and agents, now, alas (perhaps) fast fading away.
Today is Remembrance Day. But what is it that we are remembering – the dead or “the fallen”, the pity of war or its glory, waste or “sacrifice”?