Faith in Art?
Great art stands alone. As we move from awe to analysis, we begin to work out how the artist…
Chekhov at 150: The ‘Hampstead Connection’
For a week this January a galaxy of British theatre people and writers gathered at the Hampstead Theatre to…
Hemingway’s Confessions
The 1920s were Hemingway’s golden age as a man and a writer. In the last half of the decade…
Too Much Vettriano
He awakes in a midnight of Brilliantine and chiffon. The streamline headlights Of a million hunched roadsters trawl the…
Kicking Against the Navicular
I have my father’s feet: rotten roots of a leafless tree. Chipped as the old block, they’re medieval potatoes,…
Two Translated Poems
Jules Laforgue VI: Commonplace Death O pariah! And all that business of Maytime once more; All you do is repeat…
Ivor Novello, 1893-1951
He is box-office poison nowadays but Ivor Novello, at his zenith, dominated the musicals genre and had a large…
Naxos Harbour
Dusty trucks trundle to the port with chunks of pink-veined marble. Buses swerve inland and light like liquid pours…
Still Crazy After All These Years
2007 I always regretted not going to Matala. One snowy night in the early 1970s I was sleeping on…
On Tapering
In the section of his Modern Painters entitled ‘The Truth of Vegetation’ Ruskin claims that in their painting of…
Looking for Shakespeare
Double Falsehood, Brean Hammond (ed.), Arden Shakespeare, 464pp, £16.99 (paperback) Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, James Shapiro, Faber and…
And the Night-Watchman Talks on
What a shame that one of Britain’s greatest short story writers should be remembered for only one story. Actually,…
Quiet Regrets
White Egrets, Derek Walcott, Faber and Faber, 89pp, £12.99 (hardback) ‘Another emblem there!’ W. B. Yeats exclaims in ‘Coole…
High Art in the Low Countries
‘In the market place of Bruges/Stands the Belfry old and brown/Thrice consumed and thrice rebuilt/Still it watches o’er the…
The Advantages of Repression
E. M. Forster: A New Life, Wendy Moffat, Bloomsbury, 404pp, £25 Wendy Moffat’s subtitle, A New Life, refers both…
With and Without Sam
‘A Ditty Full of Old Muck’ The London Magazine has great pleasure in publishing the following two extracts from…
A Literary Cocktail: Remembering Alan Ross
Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson A Literary Cocktail: Remembering Alan Ross It may seem perverse to start at the end, but…