Woman on an Island
‘Mes pensées les plus chères sont étrangères au monde, …’ – Francis Ponge: Drame de l’expression Envy the woman…
The Fridges of Ghosts
are tall and slim. They do not smell of anything – no bacteria grow in yoghurt pots nor chicken…
SaltWater
Tobacco The taste of tobacco filled his mouth and made it water. Jim spat, and he felt ready for the…
Enclosed Orders
It was on page thirteen of Le Figaro, among items of national interest: an appeal by Monseigneur Jérôme Vallon…
Object Lessons
I’m a relentless accumulator of objects – in other words an impassioned collector, quite unable to restrain myself from…
The Creative Moment Part One
Keats and Rimbaud We are perennially fascinated by how poets transcend their early work, fulfill their potential and create…
Field-Weary
At root level Grass sucks the sun green Through its stem The ram-Bull rises Blown into shape Out of…
Mortality and Dream … and a Love of Good Books
I sometimes wonder what book I would read if I knew it were to be my last. Candide would…
The Allure of the Pearl
Read Lana’s review of the Pearl exhibition currently on at the V&A
After the Dance
For Margaret McMahon He will come when the grasses have given up their lights and hogweeds darken against the…
G. M. Hopkins, Inscape and Sprung Rhythm
During his lifetime the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) had a readership of only a handful of his…
Music for the Newer Rite
A review of Thomas Hewitt Jones’s recording ‘Incarnation: Music for Christmas’
Sir Walter – the History Man
Sir Walter Scott’s work is little read nowadays, yet everywhere there are reminders of his former status. In the…
Winter and Summer
I Obeying some fond horrible summons, as of the dead springing under the ice, I pour a kettleful each…
A Generous Correspondent
Remembering Iris Murdoch: Letters and Interviews, Jeffrey Meyers, Palgrave Macmillan 2013, 124pp, £30 (hardback) Jeffrey Meyers met Iris Murdoch…
Professor Heger’s Daughter
The first came in July when the canopy of leaves cooled the garden in the afternoon, she laid the…
My London
Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, Anne Chisholm shares with us what London means to her
The Ironical Gaiety of Isaiah Berlin
Building: Letters 1960-1975, by Isaiah Berlin, Edited by Henry Hardy and Mark Pottle, Chatto and Windus, 704pp, £40, (hardback)…
More Ladbroke Square Poems
I That old tree on the south side of the square is down. In the undergrowth between the path and…
You must be logged in to post a comment.