Royalty and Honour at War and Peace
When the dust, smoke and cordite cleared over no-man’s-land following the infamous Somme Offensive of July-September 1916, the German Commander…
T. E. Lawrence, D. H. Lawrence & Lady Chatterley’s Lover
In an enigmatic episode in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) Connie tells her father that before the Great War her lover…
A Different Sort of Provocation
This January I moved from a flat in central Exeter to a wooden house in the Loire Valley. I’ve replaced…
Redefining Chivalry
Yet some men say in many parts of England that King Arthur is not dead, but had by the…
Informing Beauty: Kathleen Raine
Once in a while you read a book that sets off an electric charge inside you. Usually it coheres…
In Search of a Literary Life
Every year, with the anti-climatic regularity of the cuckoo clock’s chirp, another gaggle of English graduates is turned loose…
Remembering John McGahern
March 2016 sees the tenth anniversary of John McGahern’s death. Author of six novels, three stand-alone collections of short…
The Village: Past & Present
In the years before WW1, Greenwich Village developed a reputation as a bohemian neighborhood with low rents, picturesque, meandering…
About my Father
I drove down to Chislehurst to clear his room, after he died. He’d not been there long, in that…
The Ritual Landscapes of Pre-Roman Britain
Many academic phrases, like much academic writing, are too awkward, verbose and cumbersome to find their way into common usage.…
Hemingway, Cézanne and the Dark Secret
 We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows. Robert Frost, ‘The Secret…
Ikey’s Bones
– What was your offence? – Receiving stolen property. – And who is with you? – I have one girl,…
Van Gogh: Art and Suicide
The peripatetic life of Vincent van Gogh (1853-90), the son of a Dutch Protestant minister, was an endless series of…
Becoming Who We Are: Concluding Thoughts
There are great advantages in for once removing ourselves distinctly from our time and letting ourselves be driven far from…
My London
Henry Eliot is a writer. Since 2011 he has run the map-magazine Curiocity with Matt Lloyd-Rose, available in bookshops across…
China’s Swinburne: the Enigma of Shao Xunmei’s Life and Art
In both China and the West, very little has been written on Shao Xunmei. Googling his name leads to a…
Jane Austen, Illustrated
Picturing Jane Austen (1775–1817) has never been easier. With her image set to grace the ten-pound note in 2017, millions…
The Children of a Demon-Queen
Amidst all the ethnic strife of Sri Lanka, it’s easy to forget that, hidden away in the interior, there remains…
Let the Mountain Sing its Own Song
My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here; My heart’s in the Highlands a-chasing the deer Robert Burns,…
Growing Up a Flaneur
As a boy I wandered through the streets, stores and parks of my East Bronx neighbourhood avidly noticing everything that…
Edmund Spenser’s Pictures
In forrein costes, men sayd, was plenty: And so there is, but all of miserye. I dempt there much to…
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