Figurehead
Salt is how you taste and Tarred rope of frayed hair at Arm and groin as if I’m Swimming…
Three Poems
Catch 1. Grey Mullet Their mouths were small, lips too soft to tether a run, or bear their weight when…
Two Translated Poems by Sergey Esenin and Vladimir Mayakovsky
To most Anglophone readers Sergey Esenin (1895-1925) and Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930) probably number among the less familiar Russian poets.…
Three poems
Condensation on a windowpane 1 I want to write something simple, something simple, few adjectives, ambiguities disallowed. Something old-fashioned: a story…
Mother’s Hats
London was the Mecca of hats for my mother and a shopping trip with her meant something for me…
Metaphysical Prose: The Art of Lydia Davis
If the name Lydia Davis doesn’t mean much to you, never fear: until recently it meant little to anyone,…
Ernest Dowson: London Poet and Absinthe Drinker
2 August 2010 marked a rather unlikely milestone in the legacy of Victorian bard Ernest Dowson; some eighty people…
Aunt Jane was a Fallen Woman, my family said
Her washing line held one dress, Grace Kelly like, large pink flowers blending to the garden. Wouldn’t have fitted…
Round and Round
Full Circle: How the Classical World Came Back to Us, Ferdinand Mount, Simon and Schuster, 438pp, £20 (hardback) I’d…
Political Movements
Raising Dust: A Cultural History of Dance in Palestine, Nicholas Rowe, I. B. Tauris, 256pp, £30 (hardback) At the…
Kleopatra: Room 62
(British Museum) What flung me out of life, I do not know: all I can recall again and again…
Ricky di Portanova
Many believed that Ricky was not a Baron from Naples. His father Paolo was even said to have declared,…
Augustine and the Birth of Autobiography
Men go out and gaze in astonishment at high mountains, the huge waves of the sea, the broad reaches of…
The Extraordinary Persistence of Faith
Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, William Dalrymple, Bloomsbury, 304pp, £20 (hardback) Since writing In…
The Crescent and the Crucifix: Breaking Ties in Massinger’s The Renegado
The Renegado, written by English dramatist Philip Massinger in 1623, is set in Tunis during the reign of the…
Joy Riding
On a morning in Lent, dense with rain, even with the wipers going it’s not easy to see the…