‘At this time my husband had taken it upon himself to send for his mother to supervise the children and the atmosphere in the house was one of blinding, deafening, obsessive antagonism.’
Short fiction by Nadine Gordimer.
Archive | A Message from T. S. Eliot
‘Readers must be encouraged to read books, not merely to talk about books they have not read.’
A message from T. S. Eliot, from the February 1954 edition of The London Magazine.
Archive | Texts for Nothing: VI by Samuel Beckett
‘Words can be blotted and the mad thoughts they invent, all you have to do is say you said nothing and so say nothing again.’
Samuel Beckett in the August 1967 edition of The London Magazine.
Archive | Poem by John Betjeman
‘Is he too ill to know that he is dying? / And, if he does know, does he really care?’
A poem by John Betjeman, from the May 1957 issue of The London Magazine.
Archive | Reflections by Louis MacNeice
‘I look in the mirror at night / And see two rooms’
This poem by Louis MacNeice originally appeared in the May 1960 edition of The London Magazine.
Archive | The Recreation Ground by Graham Swift
‘Father killed her. Not with the knife, no, nor with the pistol, nor even with the blunt instrument. It was the old weapon – hatred.’
Short fiction by Graham Swift.
Archive | Raymond Chandler by Ian Fleming
‘In the end, said Chandler, as one grew older, one grew out of gangsters and blondes and guns and, since they were the chief ingredients of thrillers, short of space fiction, that was that.’
Ian Fleming recounts his friendship with Raymond Chandler.
Archive | Heresies by Deborah Levy
‘What purpose does realism serve? … I asked … Are images of starving children, beaten workers, brutal factory owners … realistic? Myself, I think they’re absurd.’
Short fiction by Deborah Levy.
Archive | Letter in November by Sylvia Plath
‘I love them. / I love them like history.’
This poem by Sylvia Plath originally appeared in the April 1963 edition of The London Magazine, alongside six other poems of hers.
Archive | Blacamán the Good Miracle Seller by Gabriel García Márquez
‘In those days I had no powers against death, so I simply lay down in the least painful position to await it, while he sank into a delirium about a woman so lovely that she could pass through walls with a sigh.’
Short fiction by Gabriel García Márquez.
Archive | The Mother of the Child in Question by Doris Lessing
‘A rich and various lunacy inspired the human race and you could almost say the greater part of his work was dealing with this lunacy.’
Short fiction by Doris Lessing.
Archive | Some Notes on Writing Stories by Brian Glanville, Elizabeth Taylor and more
‘I feel that the only tip I would have to give to young short story writers is not to ask too many questions. Henry James said that we could be told too much. He feared that.’
A series of meditations on writing short stories by Brian Glanville, Elizabeth Taylor, Jonathan Raban and more.
Archive | The Architecture of London Pubs by Stephen Gardiner
‘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.
Archive | A Dying Breed by Hilary Mantel
‘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.
Archive | Cheap in August by Graham Greene
‘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.
Archive | America and the Beatles by Ned Rorem
‘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.
Archive | A Letter to Vernon Watkins by Dylan Thomas
‘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.
Archive | Murder and The London Magazine by Rayner Heppenstall
‘Having in recent years become saturated with criminal history, what strikes me most about that particular occasion is that all the principal guests were in one way or another involved with murderers.’
Essay by Rayner Heppenstall
Archive | The Fifty Ninth Bear by Sylvia Plath
‘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.
Fiction | The Refusal by Franz Kafka
‘The petition has been refused,’ he announced. ‘You may go.’
Fiction by Franz Kafka.
Archive | The Death of Socrates by A. E. Housman
‘They passed away into the long eclipse,
Like voices on the wandering breezes blown
Now here – now gone – but whither, all unknown.’
Poetry from A. E. Housman.
Archive | Two Poems by Sylvia Plath
‘Inscrutable, / Below shoulders not once / Seen by any man who kept his head, / You defy questions / You defy other godhood.’
Poetry by Sylvia Plath.
Archive | Tigers are Better-looking by Jean Rhys
Jean Rhys Tigers are Better-looking . . This short story by Jean Rhys originally appeared in a 1962 edition of…
Archive | Living in London – XII by Shiva Naipaul
Shiva Naipaul Living in London – XII I have had the dubious distinction of having lived in Earls Court twice:…