‘William oure brother’: 23 April 1616
A month before the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, I’m walking along the banks of the Avon, the river…
In Shadow and Blood: The Occupation of France
The Charlie Hebdo murders provoked the largest street demonstration in Paris since the Liberation of 1944. Now, in the…
Homage to a Hero and a Masterpiece: The Destruction and Rebirth of Sutherland’s Portrait of Churchill
Over sixty years on, it remains the most notorious act of wanton destruction in the history of modern British…
The New Tenants
When we go the ivy will slam a fist through the double glazing, push its fingers in between the…
Aunt Amy’s Parasol
For such a sombre woman it strikes an unexpected note of frivolity, with those flamboyant stripes of pink, white,…
Ring of Brodgar
Asking a blessing of stone. Nestled in a blaze, blue water and a cup of soft heathered hills, Orkney’s…
Mother’s Ruin
Mother’s Ruin won Third Prize in the 2016 TLM Short Story Competition. ‘Galileo was the one who thought the…
The Tulips
The Tulips enter like a corps de ballet crimson and violet vivid as wax crayons. Heads held high in expectation…
Line-Drawing
for Ken Cold, measured, you drew your father while he lay dying, teasing him into the perfection of your…
Queen of the North
to Auntie Dorothy She was the postcard, then the sea that we competed to be the first to see.…
Royalty and Honour at War and Peace
When the dust, smoke and cordite cleared over no-man’s-land following the infamous Somme Offensive of July-September 1916, the German Commander…
The Origins of Tom & Jerry
Today Tom and Jerry are familiar to us as the famous cat and mouse cartoon but to the nineteenth-century reader…
T. E. Lawrence, D. H. Lawrence & Lady Chatterley’s Lover
In an enigmatic episode in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) Connie tells her father that before the Great War her lover…
A Different Sort of Provocation
This January I moved from a flat in central Exeter to a wooden house in the Loire Valley. I’ve replaced…
Real Texts versus the Duller Page
Shakespeare’s Sonnets: An Original-Spelling Text, ed. Paul Hammond, Oxford University Press, 2016, 494pp, £19.99 (paperback) John Donne, ed. Janel…
Twilight of the Idols
Inside the head of Bruno Schulz, by Maxim Biller translated by Anthea Bell, Pushkin Press, 2015, 128 pp. £10 Summer…
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