Remembering Derek Walcott
When I realised that I was going to teach English for a year in Fort-de-France, Martinique, I brought with…
The Diaries of a Tragic Tory Leader
Sir Stafford Northcote, 8th Bt. FRS (1818-87) of Upton Pyne, near Exeter (a modest estate by Victorian standards of…
The Cathedral of Soissons
Amiens, Rouen, Riems, Bourges, Chartres… the celebrated colossi of Gothic ecclesiastical architecture in France, those peaks rising from the…
T.S. Eliot, 1922 and transatlantic culture
In his recent book, Constellation of Genius – 1922: Modernism and All That Jazz, Kevin Jackson describes the indelible…
Heathcote Williams: A Tribute
Along with Tom Stoppard, Heathcote Williams is for me the great English writer of my generation. He is first…
Seeing Robert Lowell Plain
In the centenary of his birth the major American poet Robert Lowell is back in focus, if not quite…
In Search of Freedom
I was in a taxi searching for her house, but was anxious; would she meet me, tell me her…
Cultural Readings of the Refugee Crisis
In jeans and a t-shirt, demurely slouching at the end of a table of prominent and impassioned speakers, Hassan…
Reading to Percy Lubbock
Percy Lubbock (1879-1965) was an English author, principally a literary critic, admired also in his lifetime for his fine…
Vanessa Can Stand Alone
Vanessa Bell (1879-1961), Dulwich Picture Gallery, until 4 June 2017 ‘Life apart from human beings was almost completely visual for…
My London by Navtej Sarna
Navtej Sarna is an Indian writer and diplomat. He is presently India’s ambassador to the United States. This is…
Visions for the New Era of the Patina of Time
More than sixty-five years have passed since Le Corbusier was commissioned by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru to fulfil the role of…
Malraux, Camus and the Nobel Prize by Jeffrey Meyers
André Malraux (1901-76) was born in a bourgeois quarter of Paris, Albert Camus (1913-60) in a working-class district in the…
Playing Safe
Within the pretty pale pink walls of the Adolfo Mejia theatre, in the centre of Colombia’s Caribbean coastal city of…
Essay | My London by Venetia Welby
Venetia Welby is the author of Mother of Darkness, published by Quartet Books, February 2017. This is the twenty-first article…
The King, the Prime Minister and the Loss of the American Colonies
Last June Alistair Lexden hosted a dinner at the Carlton Club for a distinguished group of Americans, deeply involved in…
Lenses from Somewhere: A Memory of Ted Hughes
After I reviewed Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being for the TLS, Ted Hughes wrote to me. He was…
Sir Christoper Wren and Henry Moore
Beside the Mansion House in the City of London is a small building which does not draw attention to itself…
Ford Madox Ford: ‘An Incurable and Dedicated Work of Fiction’
‘He sensed the virgin sucker at once. So we had the stories about Ruskin, and my Uncle Gabriel and…
Hemingway and the Gangsters
Hemingway believed that insults could be crushed and arguments settled, gangland fashion, with menacing threats or physical violence. His…