State of the Arts
It was an honour to start the year speaking at the first anniversary of the re-launch of The London Magazine.…
The Power of Literary Criticism
I would guess that most of the rich people who were conned out of millions by Bernard Madoff are not…
Bigotry Against Faith
The following is an abridged version of the Sir Sigmund Sternberg lecture delivered by Baroness Warsi at the University…
Conkers (Foret de Saint Germain en Laye)
Good for curing what-ails-you old wives profess. She thinks them found coin jingling in pockets of leaf mulch of…
The Return
I woke and found the jade back in my palm and scrambled out of bed. Lock by lock I…
Fleming Ward
That night, with thirty-nine degrees stoking my brain, I heard a seagull in the dialysis machine opposite – it…
Martin Luther Reads ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’
I imagine the monk Martin in his cell, around the hour they clink the evening bell: he flickers through…
Josiah Wedgwood (1730-95)
All is in retrospect ... – Katherine Mansfield And there’s his likeness: ‘Vase-Maker General to the Universe,’…
Extract from ‘Smoke Portrait’
Mrs Maes told me that our lesson would have to end early because her husband was going to his…
Out of the Dark
The grey man had been staying in the hotel for a fortnight now. This was unusual. It was a…
An Echo from Iraq
When God Made Hell: The British Invasion of Mesopotamia and the Creation of Iraq, 1914-21, Charles Townshend, Faber and…
Googling Muldoon
Maggot, Paul Muldoon, Faber and Faber, 128pp, £14.99 (hardback) You know the type. He has grown his hair to…
The Transylvanian Trilogy
They Were Counted, They Were Found Wanting & They Were Divided, Miklós Bánffy, Arcadia Books, 596, 470 & 336pp,…
A Fallacious Utopian
The Uses of Pessimism: and the Dangers of False Hope, Roger Scruton, Atlantic Books, 240pp, £15.99 (hardcover) I thought…
Is There Life on Mars?
How Snow Falls, Craig Raine, Atlantic Books, 176pp, £14.99 (hardback) Since arriving on the literary scene in the late…
My Modernists
Whatever Happened to Modernism?, Gabriel Josipovici, Yale University Press, 220pp, £18.99 (hardback) In literary journalism vinegar catches more flies…
The Fig and the Laurel: Petrarch’s Search for Self-Knowledge
I do not believe in my faculties, do not affirm anything, and doubt every single thing, with the single…
Pleasure and Sin: The Response of Christianity to the Dilemma of Appetite
Appetites are not to be trusted, that is for sure. Most of us have hunger for food beyond any…
The Drawings of Julia Rosier
Some years back I used to attend, as its London chairman, Sotheby’s annual exhibition of work by the employees…
Pop and Art
In April 1966 Time magazine called London the world city of the decade, proclaiming it: ‘London – The Swinging City’.