Still Crazy After All These Years
2007 I always regretted not going to Matala. One snowy night in the early 1970s I was sleeping on…
On Tapering
In the section of his Modern Painters entitled ‘The Truth of Vegetation’ Ruskin claims that in their painting of…
Looking for Shakespeare
Double Falsehood, Brean Hammond (ed.), Arden Shakespeare, 464pp, £16.99 (paperback) Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, James Shapiro, Faber and…
And the Night-Watchman Talks on
What a shame that one of Britain’s greatest short story writers should be remembered for only one story. Actually,…
Quiet Regrets
White Egrets, Derek Walcott, Faber and Faber, 89pp, £12.99 (hardback) ‘Another emblem there!’ W. B. Yeats exclaims in ‘Coole…
High Art in the Low Countries
‘In the market place of Bruges/Stands the Belfry old and brown/Thrice consumed and thrice rebuilt/Still it watches o’er the…
The Advantages of Repression
E. M. Forster: A New Life, Wendy Moffat, Bloomsbury, 404pp, £25 Wendy Moffat’s subtitle, A New Life, refers both…
With and Without Sam
‘A Ditty Full of Old Muck’ The London Magazine has great pleasure in publishing the following two extracts from…
A Literary Cocktail: Remembering Alan Ross
Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson A Literary Cocktail: Remembering Alan Ross It may seem perverse to start at the end, but…
The First Cut … A Short History of the Silhouette Portrait
Viewed in their own heyday as temporary, of varying or poor quality and throwaway, it is no wonder that…
Makars of the Smoke – Eliot’s Anglo-Scot Precursors: Harold Monro, John Davidson and James ‘BV’ Thomson
Two of the most influential yet overlooked voices of British poetry from the Yellow Nineties to the Modernist Twenties…
The Birth of Impressionism
The hundred pictures from the Musée d’Orsay in the stunning ‘Birth of Impressionism’ exhibition at the de Young museum…
Io’s Sisters
The usual English summer: early heat stoking speedwell, dog’s mercury stealing a march, then months of drizzle until rosehips…
The Rediscovery of George Calderon
When I was writing Critical Times, my history of the Times Literary Supplement, I discovered several brilliant reviewers for…
Multiple Lives
I have always had mixed feelings about biographies: I have never greatly enjoyed reading them, far preferring memoirs and…
Talking to Ourselves in the Bates Motel
Imagine if you played darts. Every time you went to the local pub the same gang was there, throwing…
Tin Plate Workers and Pearly Queens: notes on the sketchbook drawings of Ceri Richards
‘I chose that particular tinplate works because I was a bit familiar with it – father worked there, and…
Phantasmagoria in Notting Hill: Arthur Machen’s Hill of Dreams
It has variously been described as ‘without doubt the most decadent book in all of English literature’ and ‘the…
Lawn and Leaves
On the wind, the leaves come down like birds Flocking to a lawn where the grass is green and…