Essays

The best way to bolster literature in translation is to buy some, and maybe you’ll get a jump on next year’s Nobel Prize winner.

The great anthropological cookbooks of the 1960s and 1970s have been all but replaced by the fluffy side-projects of TV personalities, further alienating home cooks from their kitchens.

Part workshop, part retreat, part lecture, it hibernates for much of the year in university English departments and home offices, emerging for a week or two at the height of the summer before scuttling back to its lair.

There was the patient, but instead of being surrounded by the surgical team, she was enveloped by the metal arms of a multi-million-dollar robot resembling a giant octopus.