in lieu of a field guide

  Halfway through The Childhood of Jesus , I was asking myself more and more if Coetzee's novel is science fiction. I meant that in the ...

  ‘You and Fidel seem to get on well together,’ he remarks to the boy once they are alone. ‘He is my best friend.’ ‘So Fidel feels goodwill ...

  A writer deliberately wanted to be inscrutable on the page, and it was the fault of the reader not to see the thicket for the bush. In the...

  The streetlamps shone feebly, their shafts of woolly light only penetrating the dark of the pavements for a couple of yards, while the res...

The quest for spices began it. From the days when the Romans, in their journeys and their wars, first acquired a taste for the hot or aromat...