Iraq: Now We Must Learn Our Lesson
It is election year in the USA and, I suppose, we can only expect even less statesmanship than normal…
The Politics of Polonius
‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be.’ This was a phrase I remember my grandfather using years ago. As…
An Ocean of Chaos and Creativity
The Jemaa el Fna in Marrakech is like nowhere else on earth. Sacred space, cultural crossroads, market place, meeting…
London’s Greatest Cowboy
In the mid-1920s, a curious figure turned up in south-west London. He had emerged from one of the harshest…
‘Six Thousand Feet Beyond Man and Time’: Nietzsche’s Concept of the Übermensch
I do not wish for life again. How have I borne it? By being creative. What makes me able…
Edna O’Brien, John Huston and Joyce’s ‘The Dead’
An investigation to unearth the love lost between Edna O’Brien and John Huston (according to Joyce).
Troubled Paradise: Tehran’s Garden Suburb Turned into a Building Site
Revisiting her childhood quarter, Viveca Mellegård questions the direction Tehran is heading in a very personal look at developments in the Iranian capital.
Avant-Garde – What Avant-Garde?
The term ‘avant-garde’ continues to be used, in my opinion with far too much frequency, in discussions of contemporary…
What’s Missing from The Sahara
The Sahara is sui generis. The word alone is one of those rare, magical names we know even before…
Hamlet and Hamlet: ‘Sweet Prince’ or Scourge of Evil?
We have been blessed with a rich spate of Hamlets of late, a series of accounts of the title…
Dancing over the Abyss:
Nietzsche’s New Testament of the Self One must have chaos within to give birth to a dancing star. I…
London’s First Arab: ‘Abd-al-Wahid ‘Anuri’s
Six Months in the City On the 15th August 1600 a sixteen-man Embassy from an Arab country entered London…
Reading in Captivity
I am frequently asked what I missed most during the years of my captivity as a hostage in the…
Novels of the Recent Past
Suddenly, the 1990s seem an awfully long way off. Only a while back they were the stuff of recent…
Serious Anthony Powell
A sickly child, christened at haste, Anthony Powell was (so he tells us at the start of his memoirs)…
Abu Dhabi Globalises Culture
Abu Dhabi is a city created by decree and it is busy. The cobalt windows of its banks speak…
A Crisis of Brilliance: 1910 and the London
Art Scene In January 1910 Roger Fry had a chance encounter with a young married couple on the platform…
Herta Müller: Nobel Laureate 2009
Brigid Haines February / March 2010 Herta Müller: Nobel Laureate 2009 ‘who, with the concentration of poetry and the…
The Schumann Show
Two hundred years ago this February, baby Chopin’s fingers first reached out towards that famous Funeral March. Four months…
Poetry and Politics
Contemporary parliamentarians, in my experience, are not specially attuned to contemporary verse. There are significant exceptions. The former culture…
The Nightingale’s Song
George Beacham was a cattle doctor and a conjuror, a west-country cunning man. His house stood across the lane…
The Curious Case of Cricket and English
Literary Writing The historian George Trevelyan wrote that, if only the French lords had followed the example of their…
The Long Lost History of the Arab Spring
Then the day of reckoning befell the old men in their tawdry palaces, and the old dispensations collapsed. In…
The Privilege of Absurdity
Should we take literature seriously? I mean without laughing. I remember teachers who made me laugh, and not much…
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