Diary of a Dissenter: The Week From My Window

’What is poetry that does not save/Nations or people?’ — Czeslaw Milosz

Seamus Heaney and Joseph Brodsky, Gate Theatre, Dublin, 1988

Deniable Misdirection

SATURDAY

I’ve just finished reading my first novel in months, all 483 pages of it. It’s called Lessons, and the author has for years been one of my favourites: Ian McEwan, a British author of the Rushdie, Self, Barnes, Jacobson stream, though in my view by far the best of th…