The Fig and the Laurel: Petrarch’s Search for Self-Knowledge
I do not believe in my faculties, do not affirm anything, and doubt every single thing, with the single…
Pleasure and Sin: The Response of Christianity to the Dilemma of Appetite
Appetites are not to be trusted, that is for sure. Most of us have hunger for food beyond any…
The Drawings of Julia Rosier
Some years back I used to attend, as its London chairman, Sotheby’s annual exhibition of work by the employees…
Pop and Art
In April 1966 Time magazine called London the world city of the decade, proclaiming it: ‘London – The Swinging City’.
Carlo Gesualdo and the Strategy of ‘My Last Duchess’
Louis Friedland’s authoritative article, ‘Ferrara and “My Last Duchess”’, revealed that the duke and duchess in Robert Browning’s most…
My Correspondence with Sir Michael Levey
One of the pleasures of researching a biography when the subject has died only recently is getting to know…
Mark Twain and Pop Culture: A Love Affair
In the summer of 1917 America, with the stern face of high seriousness, was gearing up to go to…
The Savaging of Stefan Zweig
In the post-holocaust world a Jewish author, whose books had been publicly burnt by the Nazis, and who had…
Serious Anthony Powell
(Continued from the February/March 2010 issue) A recurring theme in A Dance to the Music of Time is a…
The Rhythm of Memory
‘Memory’ is a poem of six lines by W. B. Yeats that was published in his volume The Wild…
On Drawing
Drawing is not only – as we know – the basis and beginning of all art, architecture and design,…
The Rise and Rise of the Newspaper Obituary
How, in an age so restless as ours in its craving for the new and the unexpected, are we…
Bingo! – The Game’s Up?
Edward Bond has been one of the most provocative voices in modern British theatre. Throughout his career, principally as…
A Theatre Reviewer’s Life
My reviewing days were the result of a sudden enthusiastic response made at a lunch given by Richard Ingrams…
What to See: Recent Sculpture and Drawings by Jeffrey Lowe
After the death in 1975 of the abstract artist Roger Hilton, Jeff Lowe was driving in Cornwall, where Hilton…
Elizabeth David and the British Gastronomic Enlightenment
The landscape of British cuisine would be unrecognisable without the influence of Elizabeth David, whose French Provincial Cookery has…
Faith in Art?
Great art stands alone. As we move from awe to analysis, we begin to work out how the artist…
Chekhov at 150: The ‘Hampstead Connection’
For a week this January a galaxy of British theatre people and writers gathered at the Hampstead Theatre to…
Hemingway’s Confessions
The 1920s were Hemingway’s golden age as a man and a writer. In the last half of the decade…
Ivor Novello, 1893-1951
He is box-office poison nowadays but Ivor Novello, at his zenith, dominated the musicals genre and had a large…
Still Crazy After All These Years
2007 I always regretted not going to Matala. One snowy night in the early 1970s I was sleeping on…
On Tapering
In the section of his Modern Painters entitled ‘The Truth of Vegetation’ Ruskin claims that in their painting of…
And the Night-Watchman Talks on
What a shame that one of Britain’s greatest short story writers should be remembered for only one story. Actually,…