Novels of the Recent Past
Suddenly, the 1990s seem an awfully long way off. Only a while back they were the stuff of recent…
Serious Anthony Powell
A sickly child, christened at haste, Anthony Powell was (so he tells us at the start of his memoirs)…
Abu Dhabi Globalises Culture
Abu Dhabi is a city created by decree and it is busy. The cobalt windows of its banks speak…
A Crisis of Brilliance: 1910 and the London
Art Scene In January 1910 Roger Fry had a chance encounter with a young married couple on the platform…
Herta Müller: Nobel Laureate 2009
“who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed” Nobel Prize…
The Schumann Show
Two hundred years ago this February, baby Chopin’s fingers first reached out towards that famous Funeral March. Four months…
Poetry and Politics
Contemporary parliamentarians, in my experience, are not specially attuned to contemporary verse. There are significant exceptions. The former culture…
The Nightingale’s Song
George Beacham was a cattle doctor and a conjuror, a west-country cunning man. His house stood across the lane…
The Curious Case of Cricket and English
Literary Writing The historian George Trevelyan wrote that, if only the French lords had followed the example of their…
Outsleeping the Monsoon
In the purple foothills, the little hours run on light feet like spotted deer in the fallow dark leopard…
How the Snow-Leopard Became
We can barely detect them – Rauschenberg’s white paintings where the only surface interest is the shadow of passers-by…
The Blue Planet
Monks say that icons are written not painted, the gaze always recycled between mother and child. But today reading…
Lough Swilley
I squinted As the light squandered itself Into three plummets – Like votive spears Cast into the scowling water.…
Sur l’Escalier
I have these underwater days, distressed as a little mermaid by memory’s insistent minnowing, a gutted fish, left open…
The Hanging Stone
sing wind sing bracken sheafs sing saxons go away replace their tools with bog-bean spools n cottongrass cambric grey…
Long Learning
the lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne… He walks in and out of my sleep wearing…
Evelyn Waugh’s First Eight Books
The Early Works of Evelyn Waugh, Evelyn Waugh, Penguin, £20 each (hardback) The initial instalment of Penguin’s new, twenty-four…
The Eyes’ Hungers
Hare, Hugh Dunkerley, Cinnamon Press, 64pp, £7.99 (paperback) Hare is a rewarding collection about survival, not just of the…
Commemorative Classics
A look at classic editions on the publication of Penguin’s bicentennial Dickens box set
A Part for the Whole
Great Works: 50 Paintings Explored, Tom Lubbock (with an introduction by Laura Cumming), Frances Lincoln, 216pp, £18.99 (hardback) In…
Enigma Variations
Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan, The National Gallery, 9 November 2011 – 5 February 2012…
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