December 2013 - January 2014 Archives

Enclosed Orders

It was on page thirteen of Le Figaro, among items of national interest: an appeal by Monseigneur Jérôme Vallon…

My eyes are calloused with the curse of not being able to get your glimpse. My irises are templates…

I’m a relentless accumulator of objects – in other words an impassioned collector, quite unable to restrain myself from…

Keats and Rimbaud We are perennially fascinated by how poets transcend their early work, fulfill their potential and create…

At root level Grass sucks the sun green Through its stem The ram-Bull rises Blown into shape Out of…

One of the most enlightening encounters between two faiths occurred in the thirteenth century when St. Francis of Assisi…

I sometimes wonder what book I would read if I knew it were to be my last. Candide would…

Read Lana’s review of the Pearl exhibition currently on at the V&A

For Margaret McMahon He will come when the grasses have given up their lights and hogweeds darken against the…

During his lifetime the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) had a readership of only a handful of his…

A review of Thomas Hewitt Jones’s recording ‘Incarnation: Music for Christmas’

Sir Walter Scott’s work is little read nowadays, yet everywhere there are reminders of his former status. In the…

I Obeying some fond horrible summons, as of the dead springing under the ice, I pour a kettleful each…

Remembering Iris Murdoch: Letters and Interviews, Jeffrey Meyers, Palgrave Macmillan 2013, 124pp, £30 (hardback) Jeffrey Meyers met Iris Murdoch…

The first came in July when the canopy of leaves cooled the garden in the afternoon, she laid the…

Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, Anne Chisholm shares with us what London means to her

Building: Letters 1960-1975, by Isaiah Berlin, Edited by Henry Hardy and Mark Pottle, Chatto and Windus, 704pp, £40, (hardback)…

I That old tree on the south side of the square is down. In the undergrowth between the path and…

Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle. Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. But…

The Pleasure Ground: Poems 1952-2012, Richard Murphy, Bloodaxe Books, 288pp, £12 (paperback) The Pleasure Ground: Poems 1952-2012 is a…

Rabbit-holes that would trip you up In one faltered outpour of breath Wait for me in the woods. Kits…

I have felt your eyes on me before, But this time their stare is as long and unfocused As…

Sensible and slightly hapless to the young foreigner’s eye, the teacher’s court shoes had obviously been purchased after much…