‘In fifty years’ time, things will be different. We shall have reached a state where personality will be free.’
From 1956, an interview with Bertolt Brecht.
Archive | Shango the Shaky Fairy by Tony Harrison
‘Flushing in Shango’s honour I brood on punishment and love, and invoke his epiphany, here and now, in Britannia, bold but gentle, brave but neutral, an orisha in touch with the dead, the living and the yet to be, and with only double axes to grind.’
From 1970, Tony Harrison on Cuba and Shango.
Archive | Conversations with James Joyce
‘The most beautiful, most human traits are contained in the Odyssey. In Rome, when I had finished about half of the Portrait, I realised that the Odyssey had to be the sequel, and I began to write Ulysses.’
James Joyce in Zurich, 1917.
Archive | A Cavafy Find
‘My friends, when I was in love / It was many years ago / I did not share the same earth / With other mortal beings.’
From 1956, three early poems by C. P. Cavafy.
Archive | A Letter from Marcel Proust
‘I have had a great sorrow; and my heart is not one of those that can, without a bitter pang, transpose into the past that which (be it even a mere object) was as you once were, the predilection of their present and the hope of their future.’
An unpublished letter by Marcel Proust.
Archive | The Naked by Marguerite Yourcenar
‘What am I to do? Shall I conquer an empire? Shall I build a temple? Shall I write a poem that will endure longer? The fragmentary nature of action saps my inclination to act, and every victory is merely a broken mirror in which I cannot see the whole of myself.’
From 1956, an archive piece by Marguerite Yourcenar.
Archive | The Hitchhiking Game by Milan Kundera
‘It seemed to him that the girl he loved was a creation of his desire, his thoughts, and his faith and that the real girl now standing in front of him was hopelessly alien, hopelessly ambiguous. He hated her.’
From 1978, short fiction by Milan Kundera.
Archive | A Critic in Italy: An Interview with Geno Pampaloni
‘The function of the writer is to help and foster knowledge. His kind of message is not an arrow that will necessarily reach the target. Literature is an awareness of the world. It isn’t an instrument with which to change it.’
From 1976, an interview with Geno Pampaloni.
Archive | At Noon by Elizabeth Jennings
‘Lying upon my bed I see / Full noon at ease. Each way I look / A world established without me / Proclaims itself. I take a book / And flutter through the pages where / Sun leaps through shadows.’
From 1956, poetry by Elizabeth Jennings.
Archive | A 1962 Survey of Poets
The February 1962 edition of The London Magazine was dedicated to poetry.
Editor Alan Ross spoke to several poets at the time about their craft and thoughts on poetry, including Robert Graves, Philip Larkin, Derek Walcott, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and more.
Archive | The Predicament of International Style: British Painters in 1961
‘The real merit of British painting is that it is at its best romantic, unclassical, particular, fanatical, self-obsessed and the result of close observation in a misty country that has longish winter evenings.’
A survey of British painters in 1961.
Archive | Gore Vidal: Puritan Moralist
‘I have the sense that Vidal is frequently accused of cruelty when, in fact, he is simply being candid, a quality not greatly appreciated in a literary community which tends to view all criticism as conspiratorial or personally motivated.’
From 1981, an interview with Gore Vidal.
Archive | The Belfry by R. S. Thomas
‘I have seen it standing up, grey, / Gaunt, as though no sunlight / Could ever thaw out the music / Of its great bell; terrible / In its own way, for religion / Is like that.’
From 1963, poetry by R. S. Thomas.
Archive | Iris Murdoch, informally
‘A novelist working well and honestly, and only saying what he knows and what he understands, will in fact tell a lot of important truths about his society. This is why tyrannical societies are often frightened of novelists.’
From June 1968, an interview with Iris Murdoch.
Archive | Families and Friends: A Conversation in Rome with Natalia Ginzburg
‘I have always written in the first person. I find it extremely difficult to use the third person because we are all, deep down, incurable individualists.’
From 1985, an interview with Natalia Ginzburg.
Archive | Christopher Isherwood: A Conversation on Tape
‘What is true is that the dry as dust academic thing on the one hand and the sloppy solarplexus thing on the other, end in both cases in utter artistic death. But the writers form a great line in between those two and some are more at one end and some are more at the other.’
From 1960, an interview with Christopher Isherwood.
Archive | A Trip to Mentone by Italo Calvino
‘I fell into a melancholy train of thought. I wasn’t suited to live under Fascism but Fascism would win. It was the worst people who won wars.’
From 1955, short fiction by Italo Calvino.
Archive | Cyril Connolly’s Cure for the Fear of Death
‘When we die we become what we have loved, and were I to be vaporised tomorrow, the bulk of me would soon be staring out at the world through those topaz panes at which I now dream my life away looking in.’
Cyril Connolly on the fear of death.
Archive | Oasis in 1997 by Archie Cotterell
‘That they have been aided by a culture which celebrates men behaving badly and football as an art form is without doubt.’
From 1997, Archie Cotterell’s take on Oasis.
Archive | Ted Hughes and Crow
‘Poetry is nothing if not the record of just how the forces of the Universe try to redress some balance disturbed by human error.’
From 1971, an interview with Ted Hughes.
Archive | Children of the Earth by Henry Miller
‘What about the fate of our children … is there nothing to be done for them?’
This essay by Henry Miller was originally published in the July 1959 edition of The London Magazine.
Archive | Verandah by Derek Walcott
‘the sunset furled / round the last post, // ‘the flamingo colours’ of a fading world, / a ghost steps from you, my grandfather’s ghost!’
From 1965, poetry by Derek Walcott.
Archive | There is No Forgetfulness (Sonata) by Pablo Neruda
‘If you ask me where I come from I have to start talking with broken objects, / with kitchenware that has too much bitterness, / with animals quite often rotten, / and with my heavy soul.’
From 1965, poetry by Pablo Neruda.
Archive | From Realism to Reality by Alain Robbe-Grillet
‘To explain meanings that are already known goes against the most important demand of literature.’
From 1965, an essay on realism by Alain Robbe-Grillet (trans. Barbara Wright).