Old Bones for Soup
Wherever I happen to go my skeleton goes too: bone argues with bone And this is something new; I…
The Museum of Innocence
The Museum of Innocence, Orhan Pamuk, Faber and Faber, 533pp, £18.99 I love Orhan Pamuk. I’ve always enjoyed the…
Human Rights and Human Wrongs in a World Gone Mad
Freedom: Short Stories Celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Amnesty International and Mainstream Publishing, 448pp, £7.99 The Madman…
Sinister Refinement
The Pregnant Widow, Martin Amis, Jonathan Cape, 470pp, £18.99 ‘The children of the nuclear age,’ wrote Martin Amis in…
Musicwords
Reservoir Voices, Brendan Kennelly, Bloodaxe, 96pp, £8.95 I have in front of me a pile of at least fifteen…
New Collections
Mainstream Love Hotel, Todd Swift, Tall-lighthouse, 64pp, £8 Evidence, Mary Oliver, Bloodaxe, 88pp, £8.95 Shortly before he died, I…
Wedged in a Dream
Planisphere, John Ashbery, Carcanet, 160pp, £12.95 A planisphere is a circular map of the night sky. It has a…
The Savaging of Stefan Zweig
In the post-holocaust world a Jewish author, whose books had been publicly burnt by the Nazis, and who had…
Serious Anthony Powell
(Continued from the February/March 2010 issue) A recurring theme in A Dance to the Music of Time is a…
The Rhythm of Memory
‘Memory’ is a poem of six lines by W. B. Yeats that was published in his volume The Wild…
Lebanon’s Faultlines
Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East, David Hirst, Faber and Faber, 496pp, £20 (hardback) Spirit…
On Drawing
Drawing is not only – as we know – the basis and beginning of all art, architecture and design,…
Fire in the Soul
Fire in the Soul: 100 Poems for Human Rights, Ed. Dinyar Godrej, New Internationalist (supporting Amnesty International), 192pp, £9.99…
The Rise and Rise of the Newspaper Obituary
How, in an age so restless as ours in its craving for the new and the unexpected, are we…
Taking the Occasion
Taking the Occasion, Daniel Brown, Ivan R. Dee, 80pp, £13.95 (hardback) Two hundred years on, Wordsworth’s stricture about using…
‘Anything but Gentle’: Henry Moore Revisited
You could wonder about the prudence of presenting Henry Moore to the public for this 24 February to 8…
Bingo! – The Game’s Up?
Edward Bond has been one of the most provocative voices in modern British theatre. Throughout his career, principally as…
A Book of Silence
A Book of Silence, Sara Maitland, Granta, 311pp, £8.99 This lively book sets out to restore the importance of…
A Theatre Reviewer’s Life
My reviewing days were the result of a sudden enthusiastic response made at a lunch given by Richard Ingrams…
What to See: Recent Sculpture and Drawings by Jeffrey Lowe
After the death in 1975 of the abstract artist Roger Hilton, Jeff Lowe was driving in Cornwall, where Hilton…
Elizabeth David and the British Gastronomic Enlightenment
The landscape of British cuisine would be unrecognisable without the influence of Elizabeth David, whose French Provincial Cookery has…
Faith in Art?
Great art stands alone. As we move from awe to analysis, we begin to work out how the artist…