Extract from ‘Smoke Portrait’
Mrs Maes told me that our lesson would have to end early because her husband was going to his…
Out of the Dark
The grey man had been staying in the hotel for a fortnight now. This was unusual. It was a…
An Echo from Iraq
When God Made Hell: The British Invasion of Mesopotamia and the Creation of Iraq, 1914-21, Charles Townshend, Faber and…
Googling Muldoon
Maggot, Paul Muldoon, Faber and Faber, 128pp, £14.99 (hardback) You know the type. He has grown his hair to…
The Transylvanian Trilogy
They Were Counted, They Were Found Wanting & They Were Divided, Miklós Bánffy, Arcadia Books, 596, 470 & 336pp,…
A Fallacious Utopian
The Uses of Pessimism: and the Dangers of False Hope, Roger Scruton, Atlantic Books, 240pp, £15.99 (hardcover) I thought…
Is There Life on Mars?
How Snow Falls, Craig Raine, Atlantic Books, 176pp, £14.99 (hardback) Since arriving on the literary scene in the late…
My Modernists
Whatever Happened to Modernism?, Gabriel Josipovici, Yale University Press, 220pp, £18.99 (hardback) In literary journalism vinegar catches more flies…
The Fig and the Laurel: Petrarch’s Search for Self-Knowledge
I do not believe in my faculties, do not affirm anything, and doubt every single thing, with the single…
Pleasure and Sin: The Response of Christianity to the Dilemma of Appetite
Appetites are not to be trusted, that is for sure. Most of us have hunger for food beyond any…
The Drawings of Julia Rosier
Some years back I used to attend, as its London chairman, Sotheby’s annual exhibition of work by the employees…
Pop and Art
In April 1966 Time magazine called London the world city of the decade, proclaiming it: ‘London – The Swinging City’.
Carlo Gesualdo and the Strategy of ‘My Last Duchess’
Louis Friedland’s authoritative article, ‘Ferrara and “My Last Duchess”’, revealed that the duke and duchess in Robert Browning’s most…
My Correspondence with Sir Michael Levey
One of the pleasures of researching a biography when the subject has died only recently is getting to know…
Mark Twain and Pop Culture: A Love Affair
In the summer of 1917 America, with the stern face of high seriousness, was gearing up to go to…
The Clearance
The traffic wasn’t going anywhere. The Harrods sale had just started and it had taken George twenty minutes to…
The Voice Behind
The extravagance of a first-class ticket on a cross-country train to Edinburgh, Daisy Barker reflected, was worth it: few…
Extract from Caribou Island
My mother was not real. She was an early dream, a hope. She was a place. Snowy, like here,…
The Will to Live
Ghayth Armanazi, Syrian diplomat and writer, provides a timely extract in translation from this iconic Arabic poem.
Lovers by the Ice-Age Tarn
Lovers by the ice-age tarn locked within the season’s frame tender to the ancient sun all their urgent naked…