Time on Calton Hill
I’m Gran holding a long receipt, her got-the-shopping gaze on hoodies in the Forth, clinker and birch, my dirt…
Initiation (at Paphos)
The sea rang Round my seven white years. I listened to the horizon Careful To catch Aphrodite’s song. Perhaps…
It All Goes On
As grey dawn trickles round the sick-room blind couples on cliff tops watch the sun go down, a spear…
Goose Girls
They call from a childhood I never owned – two barefoot girls on the river island. Stumbling over rocks…
And These Too
Whatever glum comment escaped my lips in the pub may have stemmed from the fact I’d been reading how…
Chest of Drawers
Mercia stood in the street with the chest of drawers. It was an ugly thing, with heavy rectangular handles…
Poets’ Tales
Death Comes for the Poets, Matthew Sweeney & John Hartley Williams, Muswell Press, 314pp, £12 (paperback) Foreigners, Drunks and…
One for the Dug-Out
The Kraus Project, Jonathan Franzen, Fourth Estate, 318pp, £18.99, (Hardback) Anyone else made vaguely uneasy by the barrage of…
The Male Nude
The Male Nude: Eighteenth-Century Drawings from the Paris Academy The Wallace Collection 24 October 2013 – 19 January 2014…
On The Wrong Side of History
The Radetzky March, Joseph Roth, trans. Michael Hofmann, Granta 2013, 320pp, £9.99 (paperback) The Emperor’s Tomb, Joseph Roth, trans.…
Long After Macaulay
The ‘Georgians Revealed’ exhibition currently on at the British Library…
A Short History of Name-Dropping
The term is recent, its history short. Name-dropping was coined a term shortly after the second world war, in…
The Making of a Rhapsodic Quilt: Roland Barthes And The Deconstruction of Self
I am not contradictory; I am dispersed. Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes To write on oneself may seem a pretentious…
The Creative Moment, Part Two: Owen and Plath
Wilfred Owen, the finest English war poet, was born in Shropshire, the eldest son of a minor railway official…
Poe and Me
My introduction to Edgar Allan Poe came about courtesy of the twenty-volume Book of Knowledge, an American children’s encyclopaedia…
Unbound
Pele Cox’s dramatical production of ‘Unbound’ sees ‘the triangle of affection’ between Mary, Shelley and Byron…
The Life and Art of Sir Thomas Wyatt
Sir Thomas Wyatt is appreciated today principally for his poetry. In his own time, however, as well as producing some…
Retailing History: the Rushdie Effect
The world was gulled from the start into imagining that a magical star had risen on the literary horizon…
The Mystery of Charles Baudelaire’s Mistress
Baudelaire’s relationship with his muse, Jeanne Duval, also known as his ‘Black Venus’…
Madonna and Child
Don’t believe the lies: Joseph was a randy little sod. That’s why we had to leave, go back to…
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