Angels of Death
Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed, Ed. Gary Garrels and others, with a preface [by the popular…
Meandering Through London
The Language of Cities, Deyan Sudjic, Allen Lane, July 2017, pp. 240, £9.99 (Paperback) One of several running jokes…
Remembering Derek Walcott
When I realised that I was going to teach English for a year in Fort-de-France, Martinique, I brought with…
An Ode to Spectacles (Three Inches Thick)
She arrived right on time, smoking a cigarette round the corner, checking her watch between drags before popping in…
The Diaries of a Tragic Tory Leader
Sir Stafford Northcote, 8th Bt. FRS (1818-87) of Upton Pyne, near Exeter (a modest estate by Victorian standards of…
The Ideal Husband Exhibition
The thing is, we’ve been friends since our first day at primary and you sat down at my elbow…
Shame, Error and Guilt
Proxies: A Memoir in Twenty-four Attempts, Brian Blanchfield, Picador, August 2017, pp. 256, £9.99 (Paperback) There are changing tides…
Castillo Olite
Some English show a pride in family who volunteered to join Spain´s Civil War, seeing it as an anti-fascist…
Quick as a Moth
Quick as a moth, rises the bird in the air, all rush of wings and glancing of sun from…
Train to Penrith
There’s a lot of England left Whatever glum people say – Acres and acres of it – but dull…
Building With Light
Designing the V&A: The Museum as a Work of Art (1857-1909), Julius Bryant, published by Lund Humphries in association…
On Reading a Translation of Sappho’s poem on Jealousy
‘He seems to me equal to gods that man whoever he is who opposite you sits and listens close…
The Deep Heart’s Core
Philip Guston and the The Poets, Gallerie Dell’Accademia di Venezia, Venice, 10 May 2017 – 3 September 2017 Among…
Self-Portrait as Eve
I never use a peeler. I prefer the sweet frisson of a paring knife chasing my thumb around an…
There has to be an Afterlife
There has to be an afterlife, since matter Can neither be created or destroyed. So, fear not, you’ll continue.…
Return to Work
You: perched in an ivory pulpit, a shrew in wire-rimmed glasses. Me: bound to an office chair, a spaniel…
A Study in Blackness
The Royal Opera, London, Spring/Summer 2017 Giuseppe Verdi, Otello, Giuseppe Verdi, Don Carlo (1886 version), Richard Wagner, Die Meistersinger…
The Cathedral of Soissons
Amiens, Rouen, Riems, Bourges, Chartres… the celebrated colossi of Gothic ecclesiastical architecture in France, those peaks rising from the…
Tiger Head Sonnets
XVIII My grandfather searches for flints, for bulb fractures, for shatter marks. A kestrel is rising like smoke over tumuli.…
T.S. Eliot, 1922 and transatlantic culture
In his recent book, Constellation of Genius – 1922: Modernism and All That Jazz, Kevin Jackson describes the indelible…
It’s All In The Paint
Wayne Thiebaud, White Cube, Mason’s Yard, London, 24 May – 2 July 2017 Prunella Clough, Annely Juda, London, 24…
Heathcote Williams: A Tribute
Along with Tom Stoppard, Heathcote Williams is for me the great English writer of my generation. He is first…
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