Italophilia
The Pursuit of Italy, David Gilmour, Allen Lane, 447pp, £25 (hardback) Italy is glory, art, music, poetry and a…
The Life of the City
Jerusalem: The Biography, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 696pp, £25 (hardback) The striking cover of this book reproduces…
Dead Parrot
The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World Tate Britain, 14 June – 4 September 2011 A question that must…
The Growth of a Poet’s Mind
The Horseman’s Word, Roger Garfitt, Jonathan Cape, 378pp, £18.99 (hardback) Carl Sandburg once described the past as ‘a bucket…
A Tale of Two Fairs
Art Antiques London, Kensington Gardens, 9 – 15 June 2011 Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, 7 June –…
Comic Modulations: Opera Holland Park 2011
L’Amico Fritz, Mascagni (21 June); Don Pasquale, Donizetti (22 June); The Marriage of Figaro, Mozart (4 July) and La…
The Renaissance as the Birth of the Multifarious Self
Who would not admire this chameleon? – Pico della Mirandola My conscience is captive to the Word of God…
Our Barmy Bread
The appeal of exotic cuisines and esoteric diets has done little to diminish bread’s status as the primary foodstuff of the Western world.
The Contentions of Friendship: William Hayley, William Blake and the Writing of ‘Jerusalem’
Thy friendship oft has made my heart to ache Pray be my enemy for friendship’s sake. In the literature…
On Writing
What are the perils and pleasures of writing? And in what way, and to what extent, does the writer’s self come into play?
What Happened to Generation X?
If 1991 marked the cultural awakening of a generation with energy not seen since the 1960s, we have to ask: what happened?
The Battle of Maiwand
You have got to know what you are looking for, but on the present-day US aerial photograph of the…
Remembering Patrick Leigh Fermor
The handsome and adventurous Patrick Leigh Fermor, who died in June 2011, was a distinguished travel writer and leading…
Over There: Tin Pan Alley Goes to War
In April 1917 President Wilson plunged America into the long-running and senseless Great War – as much for sound…
Garvagh Election
When the evenings clear everything looks dirty again like a dead blackbird picked clean ploughed into the lane the…
Time Travellers
The sick are well, dead smiling, old are young, framed photos bloom on windowsills and walls, I am a…
Lilies
His tongue between her lips, she is suffocated by his breathing. Flocks of umbrellas snap shut in her as…
Severe Sweetness
(St. Theresa of Avila, Bernini) The woman is not perfected, she moans. She has travelled so far her body…
Blade of Bread
Nothing goes inside this tank, It’s called a bank. Not even the pay Which used to flow Like the…
Time and Tide
He asks his carer Where did last Thursday go? She answers Time’s peculiar as she empties water from the…
Bare
Smoking, she stutters, ‘I wish I’d never been born. I’m too soon in this world, not of this time.’…
Moth
For my father, 03.08.01 A moth ticking, persistent. The fluorescent tube hot, long, white overhead, my head bent till…
Eagle on Granite Boulder at Dusk
Here has an infinite capacity to astound Or I have an infinite capacity to be astounded. It’s like remembering…
What Time Is It?
On the pear tree at six the blackbird speaks. He talks of no creation that we, translated to his…