Blade of Bread
Nothing goes inside this tank, It’s called a bank. Not even the pay Which used to flow Like the…
Time and Tide
He asks his carer Where did last Thursday go? She answers Time’s peculiar as she empties water from the…
Eagle on Granite Boulder at Dusk
Here has an infinite capacity to astound Or I have an infinite capacity to be astounded. It’s like remembering…
What Time Is It?
On the pear tree at six the blackbird speaks. He talks of no creation that we, translated to his…
The Man from Perugia
Pietro di Cristoforo Vannucci kept a bowl Of herbs which flourished by his window. Morning light Discovered him in…
Vertigo on the Glenshane Pass
I was not bothered by the stitching under your eye until we reached the plateau and you fell in…
Museum of Flight
A young man works alone in a sparsely furnished office, tapping at a computer keyboard. He wears dark wool…
A Short-term Overseas Contract
A Filipino is clearing debris from the pool when Linda steps outside into the oily black evening. A group…
Napoleon’s Teddy Bear
Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made, Alison Castle (ed.), Taschen, 1112pp, £44.99 (hardback) When we were thirteen…
Terence Rattigan’s Theatre of the Unspoken
There is a distinctive Rattigan chord, audible in all his best plays, and present in the overtones of even his lightest farce
Among the Lost People
Train to Budapest, Dacia Maraini, Arcadia Books, 400pp, £11.99 (paperback) ‘To be a survivor it’s useful not to be…
A Fountain of Words: Inspiration and Trance in Poetry
For some poets, composition is a comparatively rapid and continuous process in which line after line appears spontaneously in…
British and French: New Paintings by Josephine Trotter
Perched on the prow of a hill, panning out over quintessentially beautiful English countryside, Josephine Trotter’s farm and studio…
Collective Spirit: Wilfrid Evill and the Art He Loved
Few have ever heard the name Wilfrid Ariel Evill. Any yet he played a crucial role in the history of modern British art.
John Donne: From Poet to Philosopher
John Donne is of course famous for his incendiary poetry; informal, biting, passionate, knotty bundles of brilliance that mostly…
Anne Frank: Tragedy and Triumph
I Anne Frank’s brilliant and complex Diary of a Young Girl (1947; definitive edition 1995) has the power to…
The Marvels of Maastricht
One Thursday lunchtime in March every year, a surprising sight can be seen in a warehouse-like building in the…
Literature and the Sciences: Where Do They Meet?
Based on a contribution to The London Magazine Discussion, LSE Space for Thought Literary Festival 2010. Let them not…
Van Gogh and his Influence on German Expressionism
Over the spring of 2007 a fruitful collusion between the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Neue Galerie…
Brother Can You Spare a Dime?: The People’s Music in the Great Depression
The 1920s had been a wild party for the city slickers but bad business, as usual, for the bulk…