Avant-Garde – What Avant-Garde?Features The term ‘avant-garde’ continues to be used, in my opinion with far too much frequency, in discussions of contemporary…
What’s Missing from The SaharaFeatures The Sahara is sui generis. The word alone is one of those rare, magical names we know even before…
Hamlet and Hamlet: ‘Sweet Prince’ or Scourge of Evil?Features We have been blessed with a rich spate of Hamlets of late, a series of accounts of the title…
Dancing over the Abyss:Features Nietzsche’s New Testament of the Self One must have chaos within to give birth to a dancing star. I…
The Wolves of ChernobylPoetryYou ask about the wolves. The reports are unclear, but it is said that they are without number. When they…
SerenPoetryIn this language ‘star’: the hard ‘t’ an unlovely metallic grain, the ‘ar’ a lingering heat. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaI prefer ‘seren’: a…
The Clock of LifePoetry Rough on my skin are the moments your absence turns more and more thin and sharp-spined are the cactuses…
Darwin in MauritiusPoetry Of all the mysteries the elephant, he said – on whose back he took a strolling seasick ride south…
The Flame Trees of Trou aux BichesPoetryNot wishing for a moment to be upstaged by clouds of blowsy blossom that cannot stay although they are the…
One-Armed Bandits i. m. D. P. 1950-2006PoetryWe were cutting the holly tree down to size, Lopping the branches and scything off leaves That pricked our fingers,…
Weak with the DawnPoetry Weak with the dawn, With a thin grey light seeping in Just below your absence and just below Everything…
The History of HeronsPoetry (Malpas, Truro) What force is at work scripting this egg yolk, Sculpting the wet tangle of the shelled bird?…
The Rape of EuropaPoetry A million fields between Amsterdam and Berlin, sewn together by hedgerows and fences into a limitless skin that covers…
Extra-CurricularPoetry When I was fourteen I lost my soul in the great depression of the Seventies it slipped away in…
Extract from Dr. Watson’s WarFiction Chapter One: 221b Baker Street It was the smell of the place. The rooms that I’d agreed to take…
If Only You Knew I Can See YouFiction On the twenty-fourth of February 1909 my husband decided to kill me. I like to believe he had thought…
A Country of WordsReviews NON-FICTION: AUTOBIOGRAPHY A Country of Words: A Palestinian Journey from the Refugee Camp to the Front Page, Abdel-Bari Atwan,…
The Ekphrasis of Philip Gross and Simon DenisonReviews POETRY I Spy Pinhole Eye, poems by Philip Gross; photographs by Simon Denison, Cinnamon Press, 80pp, £11.99 Poems which…
New CollectionsReviews POETRY ‘We needed coffee but…’, Matthew Welton, Carcanet, 96pp, £9.95 ‘Voyaging Out’, Peter Abbs, Salt, 80pp, £12.99 ‘As I…
Venice: Pure CityReviews NON-FICTION: TRAVEL Venice: Pure City, Peter Ackroyd, Chatto & Windus, 416pp, £25 Venice is light. Her finest painters have…
London’s First Arab: ‘Abd-al-Wahid ‘Anuri’sFeatures Six Months in the City On the 15th August 1600 a sixteen-man Embassy from an Arab country entered London…
Reading in CaptivityFeatures I am frequently asked what I missed most during the years of my captivity as a hostage in the…
Novels of the Recent PastFeatures Suddenly, the 1990s seem an awfully long way off. Only a while back they were the stuff of recent…
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