‘Où êtes-vous ô jeunes filles’, sighed Apollinaire nostalgically, in a particularly inventive ‘calligramme’ sent from his army post in 1914. And the names he lists form the wings of a dove hovering above a fountain: Mia, Mareye, Yette, Lorie, Annie, Marie. These by no means comprise a roll-call of his youthful conquests, of course. Perhaps they were the only ones he found it convenient to remember at that moment, or perhaps those particular names just fitted nicely into the poem’s […]

The following essay is the introduction to the latest edition of The Nowhere Man, a novel by Kamala Markandaya, first…

Katrina Bennett Low Fidelity: The Case for Shakespeare’s Reinvention Perhaps more so than any other Elizabethan writer, William Shakespeare was…

Leonard Quart Memories of the 60s I have been trying hard to emotionally survive the Trump era, while living with…

The following piece was first published in The London Magazine August 1956 Volume 3 No. 8 as “Coming to London…

Simon Tait Heaney At Home Seamus Heaney’s brother Hugh sums him up better than anyone. “Seamus’s feet never left the…

“Rosalind” by Arifa Akbar, extract taken from Tales of Two Londons: Stories from a Fractured City, ed. Claire Armitstead, Arcadia…

The following is an extract from We’ll Never Have Paris edited by Andrew Gallix (3:AM Magazine) — a new collection…

Sinead O’Brien I Go Away To Talk To Myself A trip has the same quality a Friday has. Everything ahead.…

Before a trip to Vienna a few weeks ago I asked a friend where I should go. ‘It’s all cafés…

I’m off to London for the first time in a couple of years. There are friends to visit, art exhibitions…

If it is possible to concentrate the nature of a person’s life into a brief sketch, then that of Anna Kavan is conveyed perfectly in her story Julia and the Bazooka, which seems to me a most symmetrical example of the art by which this obdurately subjective writer chose elements of her life and transformed them into something rich and strange and basically true. Written a year or so before her death in 1968, in a sense she even foresaw her end in this story […]