While on my way to Rome, I stopped off in Oxford for several weeks at my mother-in-law's. If you set out to imagine a don's house, it would look a lot like hers. Three stories packed with books, from the orderly shelves of the study where she keeps those closest to her heart and work to the half-sorted heaps and two-deep shelves of the landings where several lifetimes of reading are stored: hers, her ex-husband's, her children's. As I went up and down the stairs I'd often stop for a browse, wondering whether to take the Life of Johnson down to breakfast or an undiscovered author up to bed (Rose Macaulay, Barbara Pym, a whole canon of British fiction from every phase of postwar life). It was in this way, on an earlier visit, that I first began to love Iris Murdoch. This time I was caught by a name more familiar to Americans: Edmund Wilson. His Europe without Baedeker was propped next to some other old Hogarth Press editions, a fine Henry Green with curious art deco cover, some Virginia Woolf. Wilson, Edmund is a strange name to find in a house more accustomed to Wilson, Angus and Wilson, A.N., but there he was. Read More

Summer took off my glasses with a swift, practiced motion, the better to wrap her breasts around the bridge of my nose. "Can you still see okay?" Her first move, it must be said, was devastating. Straddling my legs with her knees on my chair, she flicked her long blonde hair over the top of my head so that the two of us were now in a sort of dark, warm tent, eye to eye. My view of her body was foreshortened, so that her breasts, though not large, obscured most of her slim, bare torso, down to the thighs. It is a view you get in only one other context. Read More