An Inimitable Journey
Landfalls: On the Edge of Islam with Ibn Battuta, Tim Mackintosh-Smith (with illustrations by Martin Yeoman), John Murray, 370pp,…
Fridge-Age Man in the Nutritional Cacophony
The Meaning of Cooking, Jean-Claude Kaufmann (translated by David Macey), Polity Press, 280pp, £17.99 (paperback) Cooking can be seen…
Moon and Little Nina
Daughter, booted, struck out of stride by the dogs, people on bicycles, the unattached sky. The horses made honest…
Distances
I guess you’ll remember the waiter who was beautiful the man with the skin of a shell who talked…
Risky Rhetoric
Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, Tony Hoagland, Bloodaxe, 96pp, £9.95 (paperback) Tony Hoagland is still something of…
Deb’s Delight
A small grimy engine with a high smoke stack and prairie-type buffers pulled a string of tarnished brown coaches…
Lluvias
Now we are in Castille, now Mad Joan, betrayed by both her husband and her father, gazes sadly from…
Waning Genius in Venice
Never has an artist been more fused with his city. All first visitors to Venice familiar with his work…
A Letter to Wat Tyler
Dear Wat, I think you would be baffled to know that a thousand years after you were slashed and stabbed,…
Kindness and Truth
A Light Song of Light, Kei Miller, Carcanet, 80pp, £9.95 (paperback) ‘[A] story will come to steal your breath,’…
A Diasporic Renaissance Man
Looking Out, Looking In: New and Selected Poems, E. A. Markham, Anvil, 256pp, £14.95 (paperback) When Edward Archie Markham…
The Cloister and the Art
Seville’s Museum of Fine Art is a gentle, serene series of galleries on two floors, set around a large…
Two Poems
A Charleston Storm The storm with blue veins Of granite scrawls its name In lightning this morning. We sip coffee…
Racine in Mary McCarthy’s A Charmed Life
Mary McCarthy’s best and most satirical novel, A Charmed Life (1955), centres on her autobiographical heroine, Martha Sinnott, and…
Riptide
A gulch in the cliffs of Ischia, Where a far-flung mother sparked life From rubbed bones, worked alone With…
Big Face
The first time it happened he was sitting in the green-fronted UBC café on Renmin Lu, watching the waitresses…
Providence
In her floating skirts she fell With the perfect rhythm of the swing Which had raised her to the…
Three Poems
Nocturnes after William Degouve De Nuncques Nocturne in the Royal Park, Brussels Left, right, straight on, fawn paths separate…
Roadworks Tehran 1978
Roadbuilders move to the rhythms of a coughing puppeteer. Crouching behind white blocks of stone only their bare feet…
An Uncollected Poem and the ‘Madrid Journal’
This poem and Bernard Spencer’s journal are a fine discovery. The journals have the haunting brilliance of his best…
The Pilgrim of Eternity: on Dante’s La Vita Nuova and Commedia
In Dante’s world there can be no tragedy. Everything has its time and place and just outcome.
Murdoch’s London
Like Dickens, Woolf and Ackroyd, Iris Murdoch is a London novelist. It is high time for a full-length study of this subject.
Non-Negotiables
An effective hostage negotiator will need to ask such question as: what are the reasons, stated and hidden, for the taking of hostages?