The Selkie
October is dying quickly now. They bring me soup but I have no appetite. My skin is the colour…
Crickadarn
From the top of the slope, among the desire lines of crows, looking down to the house and its…
Wooden Spoon
Not knives or pans. The genius of a kitchen is the wooden spoon, that archaic thing – a dugout…
Two Daughters
There was once a widowed lord with two comely daughters. Though the loss of his wife brought the lord…
André Malraux: The Writer in Politics
André Malraux [1901-75] is a writer whose stature has fallen perhaps now that his time is long gone. His…
The Upper River at Christmas
It is late December, a mild midwinter’s day ——in the week that stumbles ————between Christmas and New Year when…
Making Haste Slowly
The Intimate World of Josef Sudek, Jeu de Paume, Paris, 7 June – 25 September 2016 and The…
The Dreary Steeples Emerging Once Again
Churchill and Ireland, Paul Bew, Oxford University Press, 2016, £16.99, (hardback) Gladstone famously declared that he had a…
how to pronounce Peckham
*After Nate Marshall’s Pronounce pĕk Fold your lips like uniform of de … boy. Parents said it was when…
Self-Portraits: Exposure and Revelation
The modern self-portrait began in Renaissance Florence when artists first asserted their identity, while playing a cameo part, by…
Art in Majesty
Italian Renaissance Courts: Art, Pleasure and Power, Alison Cole, Laurence King, 2016, £19.95 (hardcover) There is a perception…
Notes Made Long Ago
Sun and moonlight scattered in furrows, only red clay remembers turning blade of plough while iron soon forgets…
Unkindness of Ravens
12 February, 1554 In the silence of winter Lady Jane Grey, brittle as a stalk of fern. Rime…
Journeying Souls
The Verandah Poems, Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, Bloodaxe, 2016, £9.95 (paperback) Selected Poems, Michael Symmons Roberts, Cape 2016, £14…
2.6 million hearts
Wars do not have holidays (employers claim they are self-employed) Their job has to be fulfilled, At any cost,…
They Don’t Make Gods For Non-Believers
Poetry Prize 2016 judges Andrew McMillan and Rebecca Perry on ‘They Don’t Make Gods For Non-Believers’: We were instantly…
Indians of South Africa
Into That Heaven of Freedom, Mohamed Keshavjee, Mawenzi House/TSAR Publishers, 2015, 312pp, £35 (hardback) Indians were in Africa long…
Crazy Days, Dog Days
‘He deserves to be hanged,’ Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society ‘He is a person without…
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