What are the perils and pleasures of writing? And in what way, and to what extent, does the writer’s self come into play?
What Happened to Generation X?
If 1991 marked the cultural awakening of a generation with energy not seen since the 1960s, we have to ask: what happened?
The Battle of Maiwand
You have got to know what you are looking for, but on the present-day US aerial photograph of the…
Remembering Patrick Leigh Fermor
The handsome and adventurous Patrick Leigh Fermor, who died in June 2011, was a distinguished travel writer and leading…
Over There: Tin Pan Alley Goes to War
In April 1917 President Wilson plunged America into the long-running and senseless Great War – as much for sound…
A Fountain of Words: Inspiration and Trance in Poetry
For some poets, composition is a comparatively rapid and continuous process in which line after line appears spontaneously in…
British and French: New Paintings by Josephine Trotter
Perched on the prow of a hill, panning out over quintessentially beautiful English countryside, Josephine Trotter’s farm and studio…
Collective Spirit: Wilfrid Evill and the Art He Loved
Few have ever heard the name Wilfrid Ariel Evill. Any yet he played a crucial role in the history of modern British art.
John Donne: From Poet to Philosopher
John Donne is of course famous for his incendiary poetry; informal, biting, passionate, knotty bundles of brilliance that mostly…
Anne Frank: Tragedy and Triumph
I Anne Frank’s brilliant and complex Diary of a Young Girl (1947; definitive edition 1995) has the power to…
The Marvels of Maastricht
One Thursday lunchtime in March every year, a surprising sight can be seen in a warehouse-like building in the…
Literature and the Sciences: Where Do They Meet?
Based on a contribution to The London Magazine Discussion, LSE Space for Thought Literary Festival 2010. Let them not…
Van Gogh and his Influence on German Expressionism
Over the spring of 2007 a fruitful collusion between the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Neue Galerie…
Brother Can You Spare a Dime?: The People’s Music in the Great Depression
The 1920s had been a wild party for the city slickers but bad business, as usual, for the bulk…
Assaying Essaying Saying: Montaigne’s Poetics of Identity
I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics; that is my physics. In 1570, at the…
Rediscovering Thackeray
We are fast approaching Thackeray’s bicentenary: he was born in Calcutta on 18 July 1811, the only son of a successful East India Company official.
The Arrival of Gastronomy
Gastronomy, ‘the art and science of delicate eating’ [OED], would have been anathema to the Christian morality of the Middle…
W.H. Auden and ‘September 1, 1939’
‘September 1, 1939’ – perhaps the most controversial poem Auden ever wrote – saw its author accused of having abandoned his country.
Lionel Trilling’s Mad Students
I Joseph Howe, the hero of Lionel Trilling’s celebrated story ‘Of This Time, of That Place’ (Partisan Review, January-February 1943),…
Nigel Hankin, and Hanklyn-Janklin
I heard about Nigel Hankin’s death in an unusual way – when an obituary reference in the BBC programme Brief…
John Soane and the Light of his Life
There is something, well, almost fraudulent about the tranquillity of the Sir John Soane Museum, about the delight in knowing…
State of the Arts
It was an honour to start the year speaking at the first anniversary of the re-launch of The London Magazine.…
The Power of Literary Criticism
I would guess that most of the rich people who were conned out of millions by Bernard Madoff are not…
Bigotry Against Faith
The following is an abridged version of the Sir Sigmund Sternberg lecture delivered by Baroness Warsi at the University…