Patrick McGuinness (born 1968) is a British academic, critic, novelist, and poet. He is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford, where he is Fellow and Tutor at St Anne's College.
Born in Tunisia in 1968 to a Belgian French-speaking mother and an English father of Irish descent, he grew up in Belgium and also lived for periods in Venezuela, Iran, Romania and the UK. He currently lives in Oxford and in Wales, with his family.
Every crashed marriage has its black box, the blow-
by-blow account of what went wrong and how,
the crescendo of mistakes that peaks, is for an instant
...
In Monet's The Beach at Trouville, it is week one of the
Franco-Prussian war.
The chair lodges in the sand between two women. One reads, the
other
...
In memory of my father, and in welcome to my son
In the wings there is one who waits to go on,
and another, his scene run, who waits to go.
...
One afternoon we watched a programme on near-death
experiences: a woman tunnelled back through life
to what came after, and was reluctant
to return, since her life paled beside the white place
...