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  1. Writing
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Interview | ‘I Dreamt of Writing about Heartbreak and Love’: Skye Jackson in Conversation with Scarlett Sabet

Interviews, Writing

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 […]

Interview | Athena Art Foundation

Interviews, Writing

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 […]

Review | Giovanni Bellini: An Introduction by Peter Humfrey

Reviews, Writing

The Venetian painter Jacopo Bellini taught his two sons, Giovanni and Gentile, who both surpassed him as artists. Gentile was sent to Constantinople to paint the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II, ruler of Venice’s traditional enemy in the eastern Mediterranean. Giovanni (1438/40-1516), who spent his entire life in that watery city, sometimes collaborated on major works with his father and brother […]

Review | Kin by Hugh Dunkerley

Reviews, Writing

Hugh Dunkerley’s second full collection of poems, Kin, presents humane and often moving explorations of life both within and beyond the self. Children, parents and parenthood, evocations of loss, fear, ecological and psychological crisis, and meditations on the interconnectedness of living things are its principal themes. ‘First contact’, the book’s opening poem, celebrates the birth of a child and their emergence from […]

Fiction | A Botanical Garden Movie by Jay Merill

Fiction, Writing

I am standing by the edge of the ornamental fish pond. Late Friday. The water isn’t spurting now. They must have shut down the mechanism. After I say mechanism I think of my mother and the odd way she behaved when we used to come here. Which was quite a lot, or as she would have put it: regular as clockwork. By the time I was seven or eight I noticed there were certain phrases she loved to repeat. Saying Botanical Gardens out loud made her go […]

Essay | ‘An Era of Maximum Foment’: How Reading My Great-Great-Grandfather’s Prison Diary Initiated Me into the World of Gulag Literature

Essays, Writing

In 1944 the Soviet Occupation of Romania led to the imposition of a communist regime in the country. My grandmother’s grandfather, Onisifor Ghibu, an independent politician who played a role in the creation of Greater Romania in 1918 and co-founded the first Romanian university in Transylvania, was the first professor at the university he taught at to be ‘purged’ and interned in a provisional prison for his ‘anti-Soviet’ activity. Carted to a prison camp in a wasteland […]

Review | Yes Yes More More by Anna Wood

Reviews, Writing

By the time the protagonist of the final story in Anna Wood’s new collection has been in New Orleans for a few days she finds herself very pleased with the city’s atmosphere: ‘Annie was bewitched by this easy life, so brilliant and simple and busy.’ This bewitchment is also the prevailing mood of the book. In Yes Yes More More life is quite often easy, if only for a moment, and Wood captures the simple, busy lives of the characters at their most brilliant […]

Interview | Richard Barnett on Wittgenstein, War and the ‘Shadow of Silence’

Interviews, Writing

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 […]

Essay | On Stefan Zweig: An Open Letter to English Heritage

Essays, Writing

The application for a blue plaque in Hallam Street, Central London, to commemorate Stefan Zweig’s residence in the city from 1933–1939, was turned down in 2012. English Heritage argued then that the Austrian writer’s ‘London connections did not appear strong enough’ and that his ‘profile has never been as high in Britain as elsewhere.’ Even at the time, this puzzled many. Zweig had been made so well-known to a new generation of English readers, mainly through […]

Interview | Nicky Wynne on St Paul’s ‘Remember Me’ Project

Interviews, Writing

‘Remember Me’ was first set up by St Paul’s Cathedral in May 2020. The online memorial commemorates those who have lost their lives during the COVID-19 pandemic and was put in place to support the bereft. The online platform received such a positive response that it was decided there would be a physical memorial at the Cathedral, so that visitors from everywhere, of all faiths and none, could attend to reflect and mourn at a place dedicated to remembering […]

Essay | The Madman and the Dwarf: Van Gogh and Lautrec by Jeffrey Meyers

Essays, Writing

Vincent Van Gogh (1853-90) and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), eleven years his junior, both contracted syphilis and died at the age of thirty-seven. Despite their completely different backgrounds, character and way of life, these freakish outsiders formed a strange friendship during the last four years of Vincent’s life.  They were drawn together by their passion for art, which relieved the agony of their lives.  They respected each other’s work, exhibited together […]

Fiction | The Anthill by Julianne Pachico [Extract]

Fiction, Writing

It’s the faded pink building down the road from the grocery store. An hour by bus from the Metrocable stop. Telephone wires cross the sky, chickens cluck from a nearby balcony, a dog with enormous testicles flees uphill. 1 p.m. Here they come. Chattering busily, streaming through the propped-open door. Ponytails bouncing, shirts untucked and speckled with dust from Tocineta and De Todito crisps. Some are in school uniforms, white socks pulled up to their knees […]

Essay | Psychogeography and Succotash by Will Vigar

Essays, Writing

After decades of hearing Looney Tunes’ Sylvester the Cat say ‘thuffering thuccotash’ my friend Dirk, a Native American, told me what Succotash actually is. Succotash is a Native American dish. Its name is Anglicised from the Narragansett word ‘msickquatash’ meaning cooked corn. I’m not sure how we got to the subject of succotash, but he told me that it was one of those dishes that everyone made differently, although it always had corn and beans in it. His family’s recipe had fatty […]

Review | The Costs of Care by Alex Diggins

Reviews, Writing

Carers are the unacknowledged stevedores of the world. The economic contribution of their unpaid humping and dumping is estimated at $10 trillion per year: 13 per cent of global GDP. In the UK, where 6,000 people become carers every day, they save the government £132 billion a year by their labour. Yet, as Sam Mills argues in her memoir The Fragments of My Father, carers  are invariably overlooked and undervalued. The ‘Clap for Carers’ in the early months of the pandemic implied caring was a one-off act: a singular performance with a triumphant crescendo and a definite end. Instead, as Mills makes clear, care is work: frequently exhausting, often dull […]

Interview | John Maxwell O’Brien on Writing his Debut Novel ‘Aloysius the Great’

Interviews, Writing

Try as I may to masquerade as an Irishman, I am most certainly a New Yorker and an American. But my grandfather was born in a pub in Kilcullen, County Kildare, and that explains a great deal in and of itself. My father reminded us with monotonous regularity that we were direct descendants of Brian Boru, King of Munster and high king of Ireland. Perhaps that’s why he often referred to us as a royal pain in the ass. I did visit Ireland in 1968, kissed the stone at Blarney, and the damn thing kissed me back! […]

Interview | Chris Power on Russian Espionage, the Callousness of Writers, and How ‘Fiction Colonises Reality’

Interviews, Writing

It goes through that strange, transformative process, where you’re taking the real and grafting fictional elements onto it, and it starts to occupy a space where the two become entangled. Or, if you like, the fiction colonises the reality. It takes over. I spent so long writing and re-writing those scenes that the fictional elements, and the people who didn’t exist but who I put in those places, take on their own reality that they get in the way of your memories […]

Interview | Christopher Wilton-Steer on Photographing the Living History of the Silk Road

Interviews, Writing

In 2019, travel photographer Christopher Wilton-Steer spent four months retracing the Silk Road, the historic trade route. Over a period of four months, he travelled 40,000 km overland by car, bus, train, ferry, horse and camel, traversing sixteen countries. He began his journey from London’s King’s Cross, where the show is staged (8th April 2021 until 16th June). The exhibition, which is sponsored by the Aga Khan Foundation and presented in partnership with King’s Cross […]

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