1. Archive
Cover image of the December 1966 edition of The London Magazine with an essay on London pubs by Stephen Gardiner.

Archive | The Architecture of London Pubs by Stephen Gardiner

Archive

‘Quite shortly the English pub will be extinct, part of history. The trouble is that the wretched brewers, in their hurry to find a modern equivalent of the traditional interior, neither stop to think nor to find proper architects and designers.’

Stephen Gardiner on the state of that bastion of so-called English cultural activity, the pub.

Cover of the April / May 1986 edition of The London Magazine with a short story by Hilary Mantel.

Archive | A Dying Breed by Hilary Mantel

Archive

‘Like many nuns, she was a great talker; a chatterbox, she would have said. It was important, she had always told me, to keep cheerful in any adversity; the platitudes that sustained her had curiously little to do with any religion.’

Short fiction by Hilary Mantel.

Cover of the August 1964 edition of The London Magazine with a short story by Graham Greene.

Archive | Cheap in August by Graham Greene

Archive

‘He had everything prepared: a bottle of Old Walker, a bucket of ice, two bottles of soda. Like books, drinks can make a room inhabited. She saw him as a man fighting in his own fashion against the sense of solitude.’

Fiction by Graham Greene.

Cover of the February 1968 edition of The London Magazine with an article on the Beatles.

Archive | America and the Beatles by Ned Rorem

Archive

‘The Beatles are good even though everyone knows they’re good, i.e. in spite of those claims of the Under Thirties about their filling a new sociological need like Civil Rights and LSD. Our need for them is neither sociological nor new, but artistic and old, specifically a renewal, a renewal of pleasure.’

Ned Rorem on The Beatles, from 1968.

Cover of the September 1957 edition of the London Magazine with a letter by Dylan Thomas.

Archive | A Letter to Vernon Watkins by Dylan Thomas

Archive

‘Now I’m almost afraid of all the once-necessary artifices and obscurities, and can’t, for the life or the death of me, get any real liberation, any diffusion or dilution or anything, into the churning bulk of the words.’

A letter from Dylan Thomas to Vernon Watkins.

Cover of the February 1961 edition of The London Magazine with a short story by Sylvia Plath.

Archive | The Fifty Ninth Bear by Sylvia Plath

Archive

‘They could easily have filled up at Mammoth Junction. He switched on the long beams, but even then the little cave of light moving ahead of them seemed no match for the dark battalions of surrounding pines.’

Fiction by Sylvia Plath.

Archive | Four Conversations: Philip Larkin by Ian Hamilton

Archive

‘Kipling said somewhere that when you can do one thing really well, then do something else. Oscar Wilde said that only mediocrities develop. I just don’t know. I don’t think I want to change: just to become better at what I am.’

Ian Hamilton talks to Philip Larkin.

Archive | Alice by W. G. Shepherd

Archive

‘Elsie, who is a medium, clairvoyant and faith-healer, / Believes that my mother came to me / From the other side and used a spiritual force / To keep me warm.’

Poetry by W. G. Shepherd.

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