It has become a truism that we recover from a break-up as we might recover from drugs, and science proves it: that the level of oxytocin flooding the brain resembles the pleasure principle of a good fix. The removal of the loved one, or the drug, leaves us bodily distraught. Is there any filmmaker who has coincided with this idle scientific fact and turned it into an aesthetic ongoing first princi…
1 “The act of union has not been an act of union of literary cultures and, for the reasons I mentioned before, there are very strong reasons for that. Imagination has a specific quality tied to landscape and locale, to community, to neighbourhoods”. So Ian McEwan reckoned when speaking to Alex Salmond at the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2012, with McEwan saying “…he believed…
In ‘The Altar of the Dead’, Henry James might appear at his most morbid, but one way of thinking about James’s work is the attenuation of cause and effect. Here, a man goes each day to church and lights a candle to the various dead who are no longer in his life, including and most especially Mary Antrim, a woman he was due to marry. There, he sees a younger woman who is lighting …
1 He couldn’t quite understand why, when he fell off his bike, and a stranger came to help him up, asking if he was okay, he was so moved. He went back to his flat and cried for the first time in what seemed like decades. As he couldn’t stop sobbing, he initially wondered if it was a sign of a breakdown, or at least an awareness that the last three months had been harder than any he co…
Muriel Spark is often a writer of harsh judgments and cruel predictions, with the former available in observation, and the latter as a technique. A word often used to describe her sensibility is acerbic, with Charlotte Higgins noting her “slender novels share a wit that travels along a sliding scale from charming to acerbic to utterly deadly.” (Guardian) Sameer Rahim reckons “Mur…