The Rhythm of Memory
‘Memory’ is a poem of six lines by W. B. Yeats that was published in his volume The Wild…
Lebanon’s Faultlines
Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East, David Hirst, Faber and Faber, 496pp, £20 (hardback) Spirit…
On Drawing
Drawing is not only – as we know – the basis and beginning of all art, architecture and design,…
Fire in the Soul
Fire in the Soul: 100 Poems for Human Rights, Ed. Dinyar Godrej, New Internationalist (supporting Amnesty International), 192pp, £9.99…
The Rise and Rise of the Newspaper Obituary
How, in an age so restless as ours in its craving for the new and the unexpected, are we…
Taking the Occasion
Taking the Occasion, Daniel Brown, Ivan R. Dee, 80pp, £13.95 (hardback) Two hundred years on, Wordsworth’s stricture about using…
‘Anything but Gentle’: Henry Moore Revisited
You could wonder about the prudence of presenting Henry Moore to the public for this 24 February to 8…
Bingo! – The Game’s Up?
Edward Bond has been one of the most provocative voices in modern British theatre. Throughout his career, principally as…
A Book of Silence
A Book of Silence, Sara Maitland, Granta, 311pp, £8.99 This lively book sets out to restore the importance of…
A Theatre Reviewer’s Life
My reviewing days were the result of a sudden enthusiastic response made at a lunch given by Richard Ingrams…
What to See: Recent Sculpture and Drawings by Jeffrey Lowe
After the death in 1975 of the abstract artist Roger Hilton, Jeff Lowe was driving in Cornwall, where Hilton…
Elizabeth David and the British Gastronomic Enlightenment
The landscape of British cuisine would be unrecognisable without the influence of Elizabeth David, whose French Provincial Cookery has…
Faith in Art?
Great art stands alone. As we move from awe to analysis, we begin to work out how the artist…
Chekhov at 150: The ‘Hampstead Connection’
For a week this January a galaxy of British theatre people and writers gathered at the Hampstead Theatre to…
Hemingway’s Confessions
The 1920s were Hemingway’s golden age as a man and a writer. In the last half of the decade…
Too Much Vettriano
He awakes in a midnight of Brilliantine and chiffon. The streamline headlights Of a million hunched roadsters trawl the…
Kicking Against the Navicular
I have my father’s feet: rotten roots of a leafless tree. Chipped as the old block, they’re medieval potatoes,…
Two Translated Poems
Jules Laforgue VI: Commonplace Death O pariah! And all that business of Maytime once more; All you do is repeat…
Ivor Novello, 1893-1951
He is box-office poison nowadays but Ivor Novello, at his zenith, dominated the musicals genre and had a large…
Naxos Harbour
Dusty trucks trundle to the port with chunks of pink-veined marble. Buses swerve inland and light like liquid pours…