Carlo Gesualdo and the Strategy of ‘My Last Duchess’
Louis Friedland’s authoritative article, ‘Ferrara and “My Last Duchess”’, revealed that the duke and duchess in Robert Browning’s most…
My Correspondence with Sir Michael Levey
One of the pleasures of researching a biography when the subject has died only recently is getting to know…
Mark Twain and Pop Culture: A Love Affair
In the summer of 1917 America, with the stern face of high seriousness, was gearing up to go to…
The Clearance
The traffic wasn’t going anywhere. The Harrods sale had just started and it had taken George twenty minutes to…
The Voice Behind
The extravagance of a first-class ticket on a cross-country train to Edinburgh, Daisy Barker reflected, was worth it: few…
Extract from Caribou Island
My mother was not real. She was an early dream, a hope. She was a place. Snowy, like here,…
The Will to Live
Ghayth Armanazi, Syrian diplomat and writer, provides a timely extract in translation from this iconic Arabic poem.
Lovers by the Ice-Age Tarn
Lovers by the ice-age tarn locked within the season’s frame tender to the ancient sun all their urgent naked…
Flesh and Steel
I remember the blurred lilies Of his tattoos How the thorny gutturals of desert battles And rubbled towns in…
Old Bones for Soup
Wherever I happen to go my skeleton goes too: bone argues with bone And this is something new; I…
The Museum of Innocence
The Museum of Innocence, Orhan Pamuk, Faber and Faber, 533pp, £18.99 I love Orhan Pamuk. I’ve always enjoyed the…
Human Rights and Human Wrongs in a World Gone Mad
Freedom: Short Stories Celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Amnesty International and Mainstream Publishing, 448pp, £7.99 The Madman…
Sinister Refinement
The Pregnant Widow, Martin Amis, Jonathan Cape, 470pp, £18.99 ‘The children of the nuclear age,’ wrote Martin Amis in…
Musicwords
Reservoir Voices, Brendan Kennelly, Bloodaxe, 96pp, £8.95 I have in front of me a pile of at least fifteen…
New Collections
Mainstream Love Hotel, Todd Swift, Tall-lighthouse, 64pp, £8 Evidence, Mary Oliver, Bloodaxe, 88pp, £8.95 Shortly before he died, I…
Wedged in a Dream
Planisphere, John Ashbery, Carcanet, 160pp, £12.95 A planisphere is a circular map of the night sky. It has a…
The Savaging of Stefan Zweig
In the post-holocaust world a Jewish author, whose books had been publicly burnt by the Nazis, and who had…
Serious Anthony Powell
(Continued from the February/March 2010 issue) A recurring theme in A Dance to the Music of Time is a…