My London
Harry Mount is the eighth writer in the My London series. Harry is a journalist, whose latest book is…
The Paradox That Was Percy Grainger
Most people have probably heard the tune popularly known as ‘In an English Country Garden’, but equally probably most…
The Sage of Chelsea
The only known surviving diaries of a Victorian regional newspaper editor were penned by my great great uncle Anthony…
The Old West Lothian Question
Bruce Anderson’s article was commissioned by The London Magazine in response to the recent Scottish referendum. There is a…
Piazza di Spagna, 1860
On the Spanish Steps there sprawls in original sun Il Padre Eterno with his rusty coat, His bright paternal…
Elterwater Rain
When I came to write of it there was no rain, just the last of its ectoplasm shivering in…
Street-Combing
for O Sun’s setting behind us at 5 pm; a turquoise stripe below a rain front strokes in sudden…
Enlightenment
The knock on the door was rapid, peremptory. Before I could answer, it opened and a tanned, silver-haired man…
Digestible Opera
The success of the Glyndebourne model, eighty years old this season, says something revealing about opera and the British…
The Transfiguration
There are no adjectives to describe the whiteness of the light emanating from Christ as he levitates above the mountaintop:…
Song of Barbed Wire
I’ve heard the red deer of Eastern Europe climb with their fawns up rocky hills to graze on poor…
The Sanctification of the Audience
Festival O/Modernt, Stockholm, 13-17 June, 2014 Prometheus is the first face of humanism. ‘All arts that mortals have come from…
The State of the Art
Six Bad Poets, Christopher Reid, Faber and Faber, 2013, 88pp, £12.99 (hardback) Oscar and I, Confessions of a Minor Poet,…
Bluebells and Lavender
‘It smells like a public convenience in there,’ said Daniel. Sheila was standing in the hallway still wearing her…
Folk Art Made By Real Folk?
British Folk Art Tate Britain 10 June 2014 – 31 August 2014 Summer Exhibition Royal Academy of Arts 9 June…
Decembrist Without December
‘His forehead was bisected by a lightning bolt scar.’ ‘Mongo’ Stolypin describing Lermontov to Leo Tolstoy, years later. I This…
Three Poems
Two New England Poets Now in my seventies, I spent most of my twenties in New England. I made friends…
Power and Greed and Corruptible Seed
Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012, Geoffrey Hill, edited by Kenneth Haynes, Oxford, 2013, 992pp, £35 (hardback) Geoffrey Hill famously divides opinion…
The Wretched Web
A web of sexual entanglements invisible when soaked in daylight. Silver lace glistening in the moonlight, a life of…
My London
This is the seventh in our series in which writers say what London has meant to them. William is…
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