The Truth About Figs
Poetry Prize 2016 judges Andrew McMillan and Rebecca Perry on ‘The Truth About Figs’: It would be easy to…
Muslim Arrivals, Old and New
The Love of Strangers: What Six Muslim Students Learned in Jane Austen’s London, Nile Green, Princeton University Press, 2015, 416pp,…
A Turning Point and Looking Forward
In 2016 Glyndebourne Festival mounted two new productions, as it usually does: Rossini’s The Barber of Seville and Berlioz’s…
Visions From The Rock
‘Zenga! Zenga!’ The Arab teachers were shouting when I arrived. They were gathered around a screen, reading about…
A Brooklyn Blue Moon
Rumbling over Brooklyn Bridge on the M train, Mia spoke of the poet we were visiting for the…
Botticelli’s Annunciation
Gabriel coming down the mountain, Gabriel with his face like wax. Sound of his wings, what does he bring?…
Breathing the World’s Air
Messages from a Lost World, Stefan Zweig, translated by Will Stone, Pushkin Press, 2016, 224pp, (hardback) The Storyteller: Tales…
Grinning at his Pomp
In this quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s death, it was inevitable that the most keenly anticipated examination of the great…
Barn Owls in Suffolk
I watch them for a long while, the pair rising and courting the field in daylight, the strange…
Occupation
So, I turned to lens cutting for a living. Corrective work, in a time of short- sightedness. ————–An astigmatic…
On the Politics and Poetics of Darjeeling
No milk or lemon, ——love black tea from Amman, ——India. At sea- level, ragged ——monsoons ghost inland, ——millennium…
A Portrait of the Artist and His Young Country: A Joycean Centenary
A couple of summers ago I was visiting the Cotswolds and in one of those attractive villages, Stow-on-the-Wold…
Hell in Arcadia
Stanley Spencer – Of Angel and Dirt, The Hepworth, Wakefield, until 5 October 2016 ‘To be a great artist one…
The Threepenny Opera
If you put on a production of Romeo and Juliet in Verona, how much does anyone care that the action…
A Bronx Childhood
I return every four or five years to my old neighbourhood and home borough, the Bronx, out of a…
Love and Friendship
Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995 Edited by Avril Horner and Anne Rowe, Chatto and Windus, 2015,…
An Exploding Goldmine
From Bow to Biennale: Artists of the East London Group, David Buckman, Francis Boutle Publishers, 2012, 382pp, £30 (paperback)…
Essay | Cliché as ‘Responsible speech’: Geoffrey Hill by Christopher Ricks
Geoffrey Hill, who died on 20th June 2016, was a great poet, a major poet. To celebrate him, we have pulled from…
Through the Witch Window
Soon I’ll be lucent, at your witch window, hand raised ready to knock. There are no lies hidden between…
Here Because We’re Here (again)
Poetry of the Second World War: An International Anthology, edited and introduced by Desmond Graham, Vintage, 2011, 320pp., £12.99…
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