Pwyll and Rhiannon, from The Mabinogi
It’s little more than a bump in the land, a footnote in the catalogue of hills, crags and ridges,…
The Shopping Trolley
The kids fought over pushing it to the top of the hill, to their ‘launch pad’ above the shopping…
An Everyday Story of Hydrography
‘No one’s interested so I gave it to Pete the Gardener’. As my grandmother aged, Pete the gardener gained…
Low Altitude
Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure. ————————————— — Rumi I fly at a delicately-low…
Second Sight
He’s come to see me off. Limps up the platform after me. I lose sight of him while I…
Kintsukuroi
—The cracked bowl that I mean to repair everyday keeps getting neglected by my secret awe for bone china…
The Real Thing
Derek Hill: A Centenary Exhibition, The Redfern Gallery, London, 9 – 16 May 2016 In 1961 Bryan Robertson, the innovative…
The Whales
Any day now, they will rise again through their cauldron of green bubbles – the gulls lifting off and…
From a Hotel Lobby
The Hotel Years, Joseph Roth, translated by Michael Hofmann, Granta, 2016, 288pp, £16.99 (hardback) For Joseph Roth, the…
Lieutenant Schmidt’s Ideal Lady
The Lady at the Kiev Racecourse A new century not long begun: a young man, unhappily married and between…
On St Cecilia’s Day
Stop listening to that music and hear instead what the dead are saying who were buried on this day…
The Death of the Literary Patron
During a recent drive-by of the Saatchi Gallery, in Duke of York Square, I found myself pondering the good…
Hell is Other Irish People
The Dirty Dust, Mártín Ó’Cadhain, translated by Alan Titley, Yale University Press, 2015, 328pp., £16.99 (hardcover) ‘Unless the clay…
The Abstract and the Concrete
The operas of Pietro Mascagni have enjoyed a revival in recent years at the festivals of Britain and Ireland.…
The Sun shines on Opera
I will always remember my first visit to Glyndebourne. It was a Sunday and I was the countertenor in Westminster…
A Precious and Fragile Gift
States of Mind: Tracing the Edges of Consciousness, Wellcome Collection, London, until 16 October 2016 ‘. . . the unconscious…
Visions of Genius
Hieronymus Bosch – Visions of Genius, Het Noord-Brabants Museum, s’ Hertogenbosch, until 8 May 2016 Five hundred years on from…
All the Russias
Russia And The Arts, The National Gallery, London, until 26 June 2016 The National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition Russia And The…
Harmonious Collision
Les Impressionnistes en Normandie, Musée Jacquemart-André, until 25 July Chefs-d’oeuvre de Budapest, Musée du Luxembourg, until 10 July The Musée…
Political Interventions
Graham Greene: Political Writer, Michael G. Brennan, 2016, Palgrave Macmillan, 208pp, £58 (hardcover) In an interview with the Evening Standard…
Guilt-Ridden Voyage
Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey, Frances Wilson, Bloomsbury, 397pp, 2016, £25 (hardcover) His life was full of…
A Fantasia on the Nature of Genius
When the death of Peter Maxwell Davies was announced on 14 March, I took down a handful of CDs…
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