The Ice in Spice
Merchant Adventurers: The Voyage of Discovery that Transformed Tudor England, James Evans, London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2013, 400pp, £25…
Public and Private Mythologies
The Fen Dancing, William Bedford, Red Squirrel Press, 2014, 70pp, £7.99 (paperback) Sleeping Keys, Jean Sprackland, Jonathan Cape, 2013,…
Modern Masters
George Orwell: English Rebel, Robert Colls, Oxford University Press, 2013, 356pp, £25 (hardback) A Strong Song Tows Us: The…
The Ship of Theseus
Repetition and Identity by Catherine Pickstock, Oxford University Press, 2013, 211pp, £12.99 (paperback) The teasing paradox that takes its…
Beryl Bainbridge’s Major Phase
The second half of the twentieth century had no ‘Bloomsbury Group’ as such. In his first book, The Movement,…
Self and Sensibility: the Poetics of Romanticism
God is nothing but the individual to the highest power. Friedrich Schlegel in Kritische Ausgabe, 1797 A world of…
The Scholar as Sisyphus: Publishing Remembering Iris Murdoch
The tortuous attempts to get my latest book into print illuminate the cur- rent state of scholarly publishing, reveal…
Trouble in the Avant-Garde
Contemporary art is big business nowadays, in more ways than one. It is has become a major refuge for…
Recanati and Leopardi
Where I am reading can become so inextricably bound to what I am reading that in recalling the book…
Der Philosophenweg
‘Über unsere Gedanken hinaus nach den Objecten giebt es keine Brücke.’* G. Ch. Lichtenberg Love’s padlocks locked on die…
Midnight London
Music sounds in the clubs now – Too loud for you and me, It’s music for the kids, Love,…
Blessed are the Sick
to be hunched in a chair the shawl of man’s shoulders draped always a little lower and rounded –…
Time on Calton Hill
I’m Gran holding a long receipt, her got-the-shopping gaze on hoodies in the Forth, clinker and birch, my dirt…
Initiation (at Paphos)
The sea rang Round my seven white years. I listened to the horizon Careful To catch Aphrodite’s song. Perhaps…
It All Goes On
As grey dawn trickles round the sick-room blind couples on cliff tops watch the sun go down, a spear…
Goose Girls
They call from a childhood I never owned – two barefoot girls on the river island. Stumbling over rocks…
And These Too
Whatever glum comment escaped my lips in the pub may have stemmed from the fact I’d been reading how…
Chest of Drawers
Mercia stood in the street with the chest of drawers. It was an ugly thing, with heavy rectangular handles…
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