No Hooting or Fuss
Peter Carpenter Bernard Spencer: Complete Poetry, edited by Peter Robinson, Bloodaxe Books, 384pp, £15 (paperback) In 1974, in an introduction…
At Your Own Perils: Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More
Sean Elliott Sir Thomas More, edited by John Jowett, Arden Shakespeare, 360pp, £16.99 (paperback) For the editors of the Arden…
Long Day’s Journey into Night
Terry Kelly Night, David Harsent, Faber and Faber, 112pp, £9.99 (paperback) David Harsent is the quintessential poet’s poet. An early…
‘Barbarous Goings On’ in 1930s Portugal
Pereira Maintains, Antonio Tabucchi, Canongate Books, 195pp, £14.99 (hardback) ‘It isn’t easy to do one’s best in a country like…
Singing the Body Electra
Erik Martiny One Secret Thing, Sharon Olds, Jonathan Cape, 96pp, £10 (paperback) The most recurrent criticism of Sharon Olds’s work…
Assaying Essaying Saying: Montaigne’s Poetics of Identity
I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics; that is my physics. In 1570, at the…
Rediscovering Thackeray
We are fast approaching Thackeray’s bicentenary: he was born in Calcutta on 18 July 1811, the only son of a successful East India Company official.
The Arrival of Gastronomy
Gastronomy, ‘the art and science of delicate eating’ [OED], would have been anathema to the Christian morality of the Middle…
W.H. Auden and ‘September 1, 1939’
‘September 1, 1939’ – perhaps the most controversial poem Auden ever wrote – saw its author accused of having abandoned his country.
Lionel Trilling’s Mad Students
I Joseph Howe, the hero of Lionel Trilling’s celebrated story ‘Of This Time, of That Place’ (Partisan Review, January-February 1943),…
Nigel Hankin, and Hanklyn-Janklin
I heard about Nigel Hankin’s death in an unusual way – when an obituary reference in the BBC programme Brief…
John Soane and the Light of his Life
There is something, well, almost fraudulent about the tranquillity of the Sir John Soane Museum, about the delight in knowing…
State of the Arts
It was an honour to start the year speaking at the first anniversary of the re-launch of The London Magazine.…
The Power of Literary Criticism
I would guess that most of the rich people who were conned out of millions by Bernard Madoff are not…
Bigotry Against Faith
The following is an abridged version of the Sir Sigmund Sternberg lecture delivered by Baroness Warsi at the University…
Hot Air
I bellow, I beef, I accost. I hit an’ act ill, I deny an’ defy an’ go deep. My…
Conkers (Foret de Saint Germain en Laye)
Good for curing what-ails-you old wives profess. She thinks them found coin jingling in pockets of leaf mulch of…
Fenians
It’s the back end of a summer in the early nineteen sixties. We are waiting, the three of us,…
The Return
I woke and found the jade back in my palm and scrambled out of bed. Lock by lock I…
Fleming Ward
That night, with thirty-nine degrees stoking my brain, I heard a seagull in the dialysis machine opposite – it…
Serenade
Sound was the first I knew of him. That almost wordless nasal moan rose like a shadow of singing…
Martin Luther Reads ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’
I imagine the monk Martin in his cell, around the hour they clink the evening bell: he flickers through…
Josiah Wedgwood (1730-95)
All is in retrospect ... – Katherine Mansfield And there’s his likeness: ‘Vase-Maker General to the Universe,’…
Extract from ‘Smoke Portrait’
Mrs Maes told me that our lesson would have to end early because her husband was going to his…