Edvard Munch: Between the Clock and the Bed, Ed. Gary Garrels and others, with a preface [by the popular…

  The Language of Cities, Deyan Sudjic, Allen Lane, July 2017, pp. 240, £9.99 (Paperback) One of several running jokes…

  When I realised that I was going to teach English for a year in Fort-de-France, Martinique, I brought with…

  She arrived right on time, smoking a cigarette round the corner, checking her watch between drags before popping in…

  Sir Stafford Northcote, 8th Bt. FRS (1818-87) of Upton Pyne, near Exeter (a modest estate by Victorian standards of…

  Proxies: A Memoir in Twenty-four Attempts, Brian Blanchfield, Picador, August 2017, pp. 256, £9.99 (Paperback) There are changing tides…

  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, rises the bird in the air, all rush of wings and glancing of sun from…

  There’s a lot of England left Whatever glum people say – Acres and acres of it – but dull…

  Designing the V&A: The Museum as a Work of Art (1857-1909), Julius Bryant, published by Lund Humphries in association…

  ‘He seems to me equal to gods that man whoever he is who opposite you sits and listens close…

  Philip Guston and the The Poets, Gallerie Dell’Accademia di Venezia, Venice, 10 May 2017 – 3 September 2017 Among…

  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, since matter Can neither be created or destroyed. So, fear not, you’ll continue.…

  You: perched in an ivory pulpit, a shrew in wire-rimmed glasses. Me: bound to an office chair, a spaniel…

  The Royal Opera, London, Spring/Summer 2017 Giuseppe Verdi, Otello, Giuseppe Verdi, Don Carlo (1886 version), Richard Wagner, Die Meistersinger…

  Amiens, Rouen, Riems, Bourges, Chartres… the celebrated colossi of Gothic ecclesiastical architecture in France, those peaks rising from the…

XVIII My grandfather searches for flints, for bulb fractures, for shatter marks. A kestrel is rising like smoke over tumuli.…

  In his recent book, Constellation of Genius – 1922: Modernism and All That Jazz, Kevin Jackson describes the indelible…

  Wayne Thiebaud, White Cube, Mason’s Yard, London, 24 May – 2 July 2017 Prunella Clough, Annely Juda, London, 24…

  Along with Tom Stoppard, Heathcote Williams is for me the great English writer of my generation. He is first…

  Confessions held by a stained glass door, glass coloured by tales of affairs and debts, horses and deaths. So…