Enigma Variations
Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan, The National Gallery, 9 November 2011 – 5 February 2012…
Methuselah’s Multiverse
Mortal Morning, Brian Aldiss, Flambard Press, 92pp, £12.99 (hardback) Anterooms, Richard Wilbur, Waywiser Press, 69 pp, £8.99 (paperback) Born…
A Riddle Dissolved
Woyzeck on the Highveld (adapted from Woyzeck by Georg Büchner), Handspring Puppet Company, toured 6 September-12 November 2011 Woyzeck…
Between Imagination and Truth
The Casual Perfect, Lavinia Greenlaw, Faber and Faber, 64pp, £12.99 (hardback) There are poets in love with poetry as…
The Long Lost History of the Arab Spring
Then the day of reckoning befell the old men in their tawdry palaces, and the old dispensations collapsed. In…
The Privilege of Absurdity
Should we take literature seriously? I mean without laughing. I remember teachers who made me laugh, and not much…
A Visionary Infection: Georg Trakl’s Dream and Derangement
I To understand the Austrian poet Georg Trakl (1887-1914) it is helpful to illuminate what, for want of a…
Iraqi Treasures: Theft from Humanity
The plunder of Iraq’s museums and archaeological sites following the 2003 invasion has caused an irreparable loss to human civilisation
What Shall We Do with a Broken Soldier?
I saw the oddest of things at a dinner on Remembrance Day. The Newark Patriotic Fund held an evening…
‘And Now I Live, and Now my Life is Done’: The Literature of the Tower of London
The words ‘Tower of London’ summon up inescapably dark images. These ancient eighteen acres carved from London’s heart, capped…
Notes from Manchuria
Notes from Manchuria, 2011 is a diary that I kept during a fortnight’s tour of the Dongbei or north-east…
Partners in Devotion: Canada’s Group of Seven
On the morning of 8 July 1917 the Canadian painter Tom Thomson set out in a distinctive birch-bark canoe…
Too much of a Bad Thing
So many tears have been shed for sugar that by rights it ought to have lost its sweetness. –…
Confessing to a Murder: The Crisis of Faith and Identity in the Nineteenth Century
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers,…
In the Drift
Convalescent, by the Kennet side, I see two raucous geese glide down to a synchronised landing through scattered waterfowl.…
Captain of Industry
At dawn in silk pyjamas, mole-skin slippers, he will wind up clocks, dozens of cream zeros set in oblong…
End of Girlhood
The first time a tree called me by name, I was thirteen and only spoke a weave of ordinary…
After the Reading
She breathes in the hairspray topnotes of a highland single malt, which needs a glass not a tooth mug.…
An Endless Trace
These days it is to small things that I go – The double thumbprint on page 83 Of Sir…
Finn’s People (Pobull Fhinn, North Uist)
Finn’s people landed and waited for him till the moors darkened and the seas grew thick. After centuries, absentmindedly…
Ferris Bridges
Further down from Ferris Bridges where the blind old gospel baritone dreamed a mirage of eternal mirrors miniature shadows…
Edinburgh Buses
Strolling around it’s not so changed – Glasgow still has its Lasses All cheek bones And button-nose, grouted faces;…
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