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He had no reason to invoke that very congenial episode, up north. But he kept thinking of it while they ate. After the public event, the dinner, and the nightcaps in the hotel lounge, they went to her room and followed the dictates of muscle memory. Being faithful won’t do a damn thing for me (he’d…

‘Okay. Carlton had your dress hoicked up over your ribcage!’

With quiet matter-of-factness, taking rightful warmth from her cup with both palms, Phoebe said, ‘He wanted to see it. So I showed him.’

‘Yes, completely straightforward. And logical. Carlton wanted to see it, so you hoicked up your…

‘It’s nothing bad. It’s good…Very early on this year I had a kind of…I wasn’t at my desk. I was reading on the sofa. I closed my eyes and imagined a visitor had come to the house. Entirely benign. A gentle ghost – a gentle reader, in fact. And guess who it was. My much younger self, come to me with…

It’s a matter of pressing interest, I find. What is the purpose of my average day?

If you’d asked me that five years ago, I would’ve equably cited John Dryden, who said that the purpose of literature is to give ‘instruction and delight’. That verdict goes back three centuries, and in my opinion …

Serious fiction could respond to the accelerated world; but serious poetry couldn’t. Naturally it couldn’t. A poem, a non-narrative poem, a lyric poem – the first thing it does is stop the clock. It stops the clock while whispering, Let us go then, you and I, let us go and examine an epiphany, a pr…