Elizabeth Gaskell
I used to go past your house on the bus, just after the museum where behind the old brick walls the mummies lay blackened and flaking in their glass sarcophagi. Men were building the museum when you lived here, and the university and the art gallery and the library, the edifices of Victorian municipality, culture to […]
Sarah Kane
When I think of the playwright Sarah Kane, I am reminded of a line from Chris Marker’s 1983 film Sans Soleil: “I found small fragments of war enshrined in everyday life.” Kane’s work finds these fragments too. Her plays, which on the surface might appear to be about the unravelling of individual, private psyches, reveal […]
Flann O’Brien
If there is one writer who should have become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in the last century it would be Brian Ò Nualláin (anglicised as Brian O’Nolan), even though he would have refused to accept an honour from a society of literature, let alone a British one prefaced by the word […]
Saki
A nervous young man, convalescing in the country, arranges a courtesy call on a lady in a nearby house. Arriving early, he is entertained by a self-possessed 15-year-old niece. Conversation is stilted, and the niece apologizes for the French window being left open onto the garden. She quietly explains that two years ago her aunt’s […]
Tayeb Salih
Hanan: Tayeb, guess what? I am nominating you to become a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature. Tayeb: Even though I am dead? Hanan: Yes, you constantly come into my thoughts – and help me think again as I am pondering or writing. I still remember when I read your brilliant novel Season of Migration to […]
Mary Shelley
Few books have gripped the popular imagination as fiercely as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). In the two centuries since its publication, Frankenstein has been adapted hundreds of times, appeared in different languages and in every conceivable genre. There are Frankenstein novels, poems, plays, operas, ballets, musicals, films, computer games and manga comics, as though each […]
Ken Smith
I trail Ken Smith’s ghost around the University of Leeds campus. He’s long dead – claimed by Legionnaire’s disease in 2003 – and I’m an unreliable witness, living in the creative fog of a two-year Cultural Fellowship in the School of English. Still, I kid myself that I can hear his heavy footsteps on the stairs, […]
Elizabeth Taylor
“She recalled her past kindness – the kindness, the affection of sixteen years – how she had taught and how she had played with her from five years old – how she had devoted all her powers to attach and amuse her in health – and how she nursed her through the various illness of […]