Charles Spencer has written an essay on the execution of Charles I
The Museum of Innocence
The Museum of Innocence, Orhan Pamuk, Faber and Faber, 533pp, £18.99 I love Orhan Pamuk. I’ve always enjoyed the…
Human Rights and Human Wrongs in a World Gone Mad
Freedom: Short Stories Celebrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Amnesty International and Mainstream Publishing, 448pp, £7.99 The Madman…
Sinister Refinement
The Pregnant Widow, Martin Amis, Jonathan Cape, 470pp, £18.99 ‘The children of the nuclear age,’ wrote Martin Amis in…
Musicwords
Reservoir Voices, Brendan Kennelly, Bloodaxe, 96pp, £8.95 I have in front of me a pile of at least fifteen…
New Collections
Mainstream Love Hotel, Todd Swift, Tall-lighthouse, 64pp, £8 Evidence, Mary Oliver, Bloodaxe, 88pp, £8.95 Shortly before he died, I…
Wedged in a Dream
Planisphere, John Ashbery, Carcanet, 160pp, £12.95 A planisphere is a circular map of the night sky. It has a…
The Savaging of Stefan Zweig
In the post-holocaust world a Jewish author, whose books had been publicly burnt by the Nazis, and who had…
Serious Anthony Powell
(Continued from the February/March 2010 issue) A recurring theme in A Dance to the Music of Time is a…
The Rhythm of Memory
‘Memory’ is a poem of six lines by W. B. Yeats that was published in his volume The Wild…
On Drawing
Drawing is not only – as we know – the basis and beginning of all art, architecture and design,…
The Rise and Rise of the Newspaper Obituary
How, in an age so restless as ours in its craving for the new and the unexpected, are we…
Bingo! – The Game’s Up?
Edward Bond has been one of the most provocative voices in modern British theatre. Throughout his career, principally as…
A Theatre Reviewer’s Life
My reviewing days were the result of a sudden enthusiastic response made at a lunch given by Richard Ingrams…
Elizabeth David and the British Gastronomic Enlightenment
The landscape of British cuisine would be unrecognisable without the influence of Elizabeth David, whose French Provincial Cookery has…
Faith in Art?
Great art stands alone. As we move from awe to analysis, we begin to work out how the artist…
Too Much Vettriano
He awakes in a midnight of Brilliantine and chiffon. The streamline headlights Of a million hunched roadsters trawl the…
Kicking Against the Navicular
I have my father’s feet: rotten roots of a leafless tree. Chipped as the old block, they’re medieval potatoes,…
Two Translated Poems
Jules Laforgue VI: Commonplace Death O pariah! And all that business of Maytime once more; All you do is repeat…