John Keats and the Vale of Soul-Making
like this place very much. John Keats to J. H. Reynolds, 22nd November 1817 That which is creative…
The Pope Gives His Approval
Summers always have to come to an end. As the children went back to their respective schools, I realised…
Marilynne Robinson: The Gilead Novels
With Gilead (2004), Home (2008) and Lila (2014) Marilynne Robinson has produced a body of work of a quality…
Mailer on Hemingway and Lawrence
In the New York Times of November 28, 2014 Dwight Garner called Norman Mailer’s letters ‘mostly low-wattage, a rolling…
Growing Pains
It is a question I have, from time to time, asked myself. If I had had the sort of…
Elizabeth Bishop: Art From Life and Life Itself
Happiness is not a word readily associated with Elizabeth Bishop. Despite the voluminous accolades and honours showered upon her…
On Robert Louis Stevenson’s Journey
Robert Louis Stevenson was in his late twenties and not yet widely known as a writer. He had been…
Myths of the MacArthur Suite
When the tour guide throws open the doors to the Douglas MacArthur Suite, I’m fairly sure what to expect.…
An Unlikely Friendship
From his room in West London he could hear the approach of footsteps on the street below. The birds were…
Katherine Mansfield’s Russian Healers
During the last two years of her life, Katherine Mansfield, ailing with tuber-culosis, was attracted to her Russian ‘healers’ in…
In the Shadow of War The Balkan Century
Sarajevo, on the 28th of June in the year ‘14, was en fête. A unique foreign delegation was coming, and the hotels were booked up; the pavements along the river were filling, the crowd’s diversity appropriate to this historically so cosmopolitan city. Could any have said exactly why they were there, or what they were looking at? Put face-to-face with History, it’s difficult to know quite where we stand.
My London
Harry Mount is the eighth writer in the My London series. Harry is a journalist, whose latest book is…
The Paradox That Was Percy Grainger
Most people have probably heard the tune popularly known as ‘In an English Country Garden’, but equally probably most…
The Sage of Chelsea
The only known surviving diaries of a Victorian regional newspaper editor were penned by my great great uncle Anthony…
The Old West Lothian Question
Bruce Anderson’s article was commissioned by The London Magazine in response to the recent Scottish referendum. There is a…
Decembrist Without December
‘His forehead was bisected by a lightning bolt scar.’ ‘Mongo’ Stolypin describing Lermontov to Leo Tolstoy, years later. I This…
My London
This is the seventh in our series in which writers say what London has meant to them. William is…
Bookending Dylan Thomas
On the centenary of Dylan Thomas’s birth, Karwowski examines Thomas’s ‘Altarwise by owl-light’
‘Beirt daoine uasal’: Two Noble Persons The Irelands of J. M. Synge and Heinrich Böll
The London premiere of Robert J. Flaherty’s film, Man of Aran, was held on the 25th of April, 1934.…
Killers of The King by Charles Spencer
Charles Spencer has written an essay on the execution of Charles I
Sebastian Barker: ‘A Glass That’s Rubbed Enough To Sing’
I saw too little of Sebastian Barker. Our paths crossed every so often – at a lecture, a poetry reading…
A Child of World War I
If World War I had never happened, I wouldn’t be here. My father, John Dudley Lucie-Smith, met my mother,…
A Liberal Flirtation: Edmund Wilson & Sir Isaiah Berlin
Isaiah Berlin affected me like nobody else I had known; though he was not particularly handsome, I tended to react…
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