The Signora had no business to do it,” said Miss Bartlett, “no business at all. She promised us south rooms with a view close together, instead of which here are… Read More »E.M.Forster A Room with a View: Opening Chapter
The Day Lady Died It is 12:20 in New York a Fridaythree days after Bastille day, yesit is 1959 and I go get a shoeshinebecause I will get off… Read More »Frank O'Hara: The Day Lady Died.
The Darkling Thrush I leant upon a coppice gate When Frost was spectre-gray,And Winter’s dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day.The tangled bine-stems scored the sky Like strings of… Read More »Thomas Hardy: The Darkling Thrush
Well I started the book last night and have thus been reunited with Lisbeth Salander, this time in the midst of Hurricane Matilda where she disposes of a potential… Read More »Stig Larsson: The Girl Who played with Fire
Sometimes a day in bed with the aftermath of migraine can yield untold pleasure! This book had been recommended in the most positive terms and had sat by the side… Read More »The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
Chapter 8 Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens Nicholas assisted his master to put on an old fustian shooting- jacket, which he took down from a peg in the passage; and… Read More »Charles Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby and Great Expectations
Dark School It is dusk when I enter the classroom, the last of the chalky Latin verbs going out on the board. I sit at a desk at the back… Read More »Carol Ann Duffy: Dark School
Mrs Lazarus I had grieved. I had wept for a night and a dayover my loss, ripped the cloth I was married infrom my breasts, howled, shrieked, clawedat the… Read More »Carol Ann Duffy : Mrs Lazarus (again see rest of blog)
You could travel up the Blue Nilewith your finger, tracing the routewhile Mrs Tilscher chanted the scenery.Tana. Ethiopia. Khartoum. Aswan.That for an hour, then a skittle of milkand the chalky… Read More »Carol Ann Duffy: Mrs Tilscher's Class ( Three-see rest of blog!)
“It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days. An expedition, I should say, which I will undertake… Read More »The Remains of the Day: Kazuo Ishiguro
The Going Why did you give no hint that night That quickly after the morrow’s dawn, And calmly, as if indifferent quite, You would close your term here, up… Read More »Thomas Hardy: The Going
And when we reached the Casino, of course Mrs. Raddick wasn’t there. There wasn’t a sign of her on the steps–not a sign. “Will you stay in the car while… Read More »Katherine Mansfield: The Young Girl
The dog with golden eyes watched the woman with the stick picking her way across the church yard. Somehow she needed him to watch her find this place and he… Read More »Nature
Are you a reader? Do you read then…? Katherine’s words seemed exiled from her mouth. These attempts at friendship were almost quaint these days and yet for the moment she… Read More »Promise
‘But there are other kilings that are harder to connnect, the links between them obscured by great distances, by the passage of years, by the layering of this honeycomb world… Read More »John Connolly: The Reapers
