Marcel Proust and his oeuvre are at once overexposed and mysterious. Entire books and studies have explored the minute details of his personal life and literary work. There is a book about what cures and medications he took specifically for his insomnia. There is a hundred-page academic study dedicated solely to the eight-word first sentence […]

I was thirteen when I first encountered The Bloody Chamber, back in the humid and claustrophobic childhood bedroom that I shared with my older sister in Bukit Timah, Singapore. I remember idly scanning my sister’s bookshelf; plywood, festooned with glow-in-the-dark plastic stars. I spotted a bent orange spine on the second shelf […]

Great drama has a way of always being relevant whenever it is performed, even if, like T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, it isn’t performed very often. The play is, of course, about the assassination of Thomas Becket, but with undertones of the shadow of Fascism over Europe. Next year sees the 850th anniversary of the event […]

Patrick Maxwell Tony Harrison: Poetry & Class The use of poetry as a form of class war has arguably never…

Chris Rice first met Matthew Sweeney at a poetry workshop in London in 1976, and they remained friends for forty-two years until Matthew’s death in 2018. Chris Rice’s elegy to Matthew and their long friendship […]

Jelgava, lying just a short distance south of the Latvian capital Riga, once the seat of the Dukes of Courland as well as being a western outpost of the Russian Tsarist empire, has historically been something of a cultural crossroads. Whereas Riga became prosperous […]

The following essay is an extract from Kenneth Womack’s forthcoming book Solid State: The Story of “Abbey Road” and the…

A maverick anarchist, bookseller and entrepreneur, Richard Booth, who has died aged 80, transformed the small Powys town of Hay-on-Wye into a mecca for the second-hand book. His significant and colourful legacy in the book trade inspired a formula […]

A. E. Housman was an introverted man whose poetry is somewhat unique in its widespread appeal. Despite only producing two collections of poetry in his lifetime (A Shropshire Lad in 1896 and Last Poems in 1922), his reputation as a master of lyricism […]

In the pub, Jemima raises both her arms above her, then swings one back, turning her head to follow the arc it makes in the air. “Something like that,” she says, sitting back down and taking a chip from the plate between us.
We are attempting a reconstruction. What we are attempting to reconstruct is a theatre show called Trilogy, made by an artist called […]

‘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…