Not long ago I sat next to a young Portuguese novelist at dinner and told him I intended to read his first novel. He grabbed my wrist, genuinely distressed, and said: ‘Oh, please don’t! Back then, all...
My phone buzzed so frequently it seemed to have an animal life of its own.
Most of us have complicated backstories, messy histories, multiple narratives. It was a high-wire strategy, for Obama, this invocation of our collective human messiness. His enemies latched on to its...
Maybe there will always be men who say the right thing at the right time, who step forward like Thespis at just the right moment of history, and then there will be men like Archie Jones who are just t...
Life was an enormous rucksack so impossibly heavy that, even though it meant losing everything, it was infinitely easier to leave all baggage here on the roadside and walk into the blackness.
Libraries are not failing because they are libraries. Neglected libraries get neglected, and this cycle, in time, provides the excuse to close them. Well-run libraries are filled with people because w...
Jeder Augenblick geschieht zweifach: innen und außen, und es sind zwei unterschiedliche Geschichten.
It’s so weird watching rappers becoming elder statesmen. I’m out for presidents to represent me. Well, now they do—and not only on dollar bills. Heavy responsibility lands on the shoulders of these un...
It’s claimed that Americans viewed twelve times as many Web pages about Miley Cyrus as about the gas attack in Syria.
It’s a part of what art is here to imagine for us and with us. (I’m a sentimental humanist: I believe art is here to help, even if the help is painful—especially then.)
It's a funny thing about the modern world. You hear girls in the toilets of clubs saying, Yeah, he fucked off and left me. He didn't love me. He just couldn't with love. He was too fucked up to know...
It wasn’t any one writer or article he was worried about, but the font. The meaning embedded, at a preconscious level, by the look of the magazine; the seal, as he described it, that the typography an...
It was in the air, or so it seemed to Kiki, this hatred of women and their bodies – it seeped in with every draught in the house; people brought it home on their shoes, they breathed it in off their n...
It was his fourth trip to the attic in so many days, ferrying out the odds and ends of a marriage to his new flat, and the Hoover was amongst the very last items he reclaimed – one of the most broken...
It was during this time that Archie learned the true power of do-it-yourself, how it uses a hammer and nails to replace nouns and adjectives, how it allows men to communicate. A lesson he kept with hi...
It takes a lot of practice to ensure that a whole bottle of Cabernet and a pint of beer makes only a slight dent in your sobriety, but Howard felt he had reached this stage of accomplishment.
It looks backward, at the past, and it learns from what’s gone before. Some people never learn. My
It felt to me as if I were on a certain train, heading wherever it was people like me usually went...except now suddenly something was different. I'd been informed that I would be getting off at an un...
In short, it was precisely the kind of friendship an Englishman makes on holiday, that he can make only on holiday. A friendship that crosses class and colour, a friendship that takes as its basis phy...
In my conscious life, though, I cannot honestly say I feel proud to be white and ashamed to be black or proud to be black and ashamed to be white. I find it impossible to experience either pride or sh...