The First Cut … A Short History of the Silhouette Portrait
Viewed in their own heyday as temporary, of varying or poor quality and throwaway, it is no wonder that…
Makars of the Smoke – Eliot’s Anglo-Scot Precursors: Harold Monro, John Davidson and James ‘BV’ Thomson
Two of the most influential yet overlooked voices of British poetry from the Yellow Nineties to the Modernist Twenties…
The Birth of Impressionism
The hundred pictures from the Musée d’Orsay in the stunning ‘Birth of Impressionism’ exhibition at the de Young museum…
Io’s Sisters
The usual English summer: early heat stoking speedwell, dog’s mercury stealing a march, then months of drizzle until rosehips…
The Rediscovery of George Calderon
When I was writing Critical Times, my history of the Times Literary Supplement, I discovered several brilliant reviewers for…
Multiple Lives
I have always had mixed feelings about biographies: I have never greatly enjoyed reading them, far preferring memoirs and…
Talking to Ourselves in the Bates Motel
Imagine if you played darts. Every time you went to the local pub the same gang was there, throwing…
Tin Plate Workers and Pearly Queens: notes on the sketchbook drawings of Ceri Richards
‘I chose that particular tinplate works because I was a bit familiar with it – father worked there, and…
Phantasmagoria in Notting Hill: Arthur Machen’s Hill of Dreams
It has variously been described as ‘without doubt the most decadent book in all of English literature’ and ‘the…
Lawn and Leaves
On the wind, the leaves come down like birds Flocking to a lawn where the grass is green and…
Mahler and the Music of the Future
By the accident of his dates of birth and death Mahler has provided us with two consecutive years by…
Holding Forth on Holding Back: How Food Has Been Shared Through the Ages
The sight of dogs frantically inhaling their food is strangely hypnotic. Where more than one is present growling, yapping…
Brindle Revisited
A sour wind howls down Duxon Hill, weeds lengthen in the cobbled yard, the lime trees on the lawn…
A Month in the Country
XVII How many kinds of mist? And times of mist? How many places for the mist to close over…
A Short Walk Down Whitehall
Even on the ten thousandth occasion, a walk along Whitehall ought to remind one that history is now and…
Three Poems
I Gilgamesh At the Blasted Gates At the blasted gates Gilgamesh falls to his knees. ‘What now?’ he cries. His…
In the Black Country
(for Roy Palmer) Brush the sooted trees at Cradley, Tramp the ironworks’ ash at Brierley, Taste the coal-dust, swirled…