The First Cut … A Short History of the Silhouette Portrait
Viewed in their own heyday as temporary, of varying or poor quality and throwaway, it is no wonder that…
Makars of the Smoke – Eliot’s Anglo-Scot Precursors: Harold Monro, John Davidson and James ‘BV’ Thomson
Two of the most influential yet overlooked voices of British poetry from the Yellow Nineties to the Modernist Twenties…
The Birth of Impressionism
The hundred pictures from the Musée d’Orsay in the stunning ‘Birth of Impressionism’ exhibition at the de Young museum…
The Rediscovery of George Calderon
When I was writing Critical Times, my history of the Times Literary Supplement, I discovered several brilliant reviewers for…
Multiple Lives
I have always had mixed feelings about biographies: I have never greatly enjoyed reading them, far preferring memoirs and…
Talking to Ourselves in the Bates Motel
Imagine if you played darts. Every time you went to the local pub the same gang was there, throwing…
Tin Plate Workers and Pearly Queens: notes on the sketchbook drawings of Ceri Richards
‘I chose that particular tinplate works because I was a bit familiar with it – father worked there, and…
Phantasmagoria in Notting Hill: Arthur Machen’s Hill of Dreams
It has variously been described as ‘without doubt the most decadent book in all of English literature’ and ‘the…
Mahler and the Music of the Future
By the accident of his dates of birth and death Mahler has provided us with two consecutive years by…
Holding Forth on Holding Back: How Food Has Been Shared Through the Ages
The sight of dogs frantically inhaling their food is strangely hypnotic. Where more than one is present growling, yapping…
A Short Walk Down Whitehall
Even on the ten thousandth occasion, a walk along Whitehall ought to remind one that history is now and…
Metaphysical Prose: The Art of Lydia Davis
If the name Lydia Davis doesn’t mean much to you, never fear: until recently it meant little to anyone,…
Ernest Dowson: London Poet and Absinthe Drinker
2 August 2010 marked a rather unlikely milestone in the legacy of Victorian bard Ernest Dowson; some eighty people…
Augustine and the Birth of Autobiography
Men go out and gaze in astonishment at high mountains, the huge waves of the sea, the broad reaches of…
The Crescent and the Crucifix: Breaking Ties in Massinger’s The Renegado
The Renegado, written by English dramatist Philip Massinger in 1623, is set in Tunis during the reign of the…
Banjoes on the Lawn: Scott Fitzgerald and Show Biz
F. Scott Fitzgerald, like other novelists, harboured a desire for the stage. Stuck forever and a day in a…
John Huston: Fine Arts and Films
Long before John Huston became famous as a screenwriter, director and actor, he had studied drawing and painting in…
Waning Genius in Venice
Never has an artist been more fused with his city. All first visitors to Venice familiar with his work…
The Cloister and the Art
Seville’s Museum of Fine Art is a gentle, serene series of galleries on two floors, set around a large…
Racine in Mary McCarthy’s A Charmed Life
Mary McCarthy’s best and most satirical novel, A Charmed Life (1955), centres on her autobiographical heroine, Martha Sinnott, and…
An Uncollected Poem and the ‘Madrid Journal’
This poem and Bernard Spencer’s journal are a fine discovery. The journals have the haunting brilliance of his best…
The Pilgrim of Eternity: on Dante’s La Vita Nuova and Commedia
In Dante’s world there can be no tragedy. Everything has its time and place and just outcome.
Non-Negotiables
An effective hostage negotiator will need to ask such question as: what are the reasons, stated and hidden, for the taking of hostages?