Another poet who is never far from me is Frank O’Hara. I don’t think I’d be a poet if not for his influence when I first began writing years ago. I love O’Hara’s ability to paint a scene – he wrote with such a delicious intimacy and an eye for the small moments that make up a life. I’m very drawn to his voice. When I read his poetry, I feel like I’m having a warm conversation with a very close friend. He gives you the room to breathe and listen. So Lunch Poems is pretty much […]

As people who look at great pre-modern art every day for both work and pleasure, we are passionate about enabling others to discover what it has to offer. It is encouraging to see the huge appetite for high-quality digital content about art over the past year, but it has also highlighted three issues. The first is the sheer volume of material being uploaded to museum websites, Instagram and YouTube that no individual has the time to sift through. The second is that […]

Reading Ray Monk’s magnificent biography of Wittgenstein, I came across a letter to his nephew, written some time in the thirties, in which he said that ‘[the war] saved my life; I don’t know what I’d have done without it.’ To find a philosopher as perceptive and as unillusioned as Wittgenstein saying that the war had saved his life – and then to find he’d worked out much of the Tractatus while serving as a forward artillery observer, about the most dangerous posting anywhere in the war – stopped me dead […]