A Country of Words
NON-FICTION: AUTOBIOGRAPHY A Country of Words: A Palestinian Journey from the Refugee Camp to the Front Page, Abdel-Bari Atwan,…
The Ekphrasis of Philip Gross and Simon Denison
POETRY I Spy Pinhole Eye, poems by Philip Gross; photographs by Simon Denison, Cinnamon Press, 80pp, £11.99 Poems which…
New Collections
POETRY ‘We needed coffee but…’, Matthew Welton, Carcanet, 96pp, £9.95 ‘Voyaging Out’, Peter Abbs, Salt, 80pp, £12.99 ‘As I…
Venice: Pure City
NON-FICTION: TRAVEL Venice: Pure City, Peter Ackroyd, Chatto & Windus, 416pp, £25 Venice is light. Her finest painters have…
London’s First Arab: ‘Abd-al-Wahid ‘Anuri’s
Six Months in the City On the 15th August 1600 a sixteen-man Embassy from an Arab country entered London…
Reading in Captivity
I am frequently asked what I missed most during the years of my captivity as a hostage in the…
Novels of the Recent Past
Suddenly, the 1990s seem an awfully long way off. Only a while back they were the stuff of recent…
Serious Anthony Powell
A sickly child, christened at haste, Anthony Powell was (so he tells us at the start of his memoirs)…
Abu Dhabi Globalises Culture
Abu Dhabi is a city created by decree and it is busy. The cobalt windows of its banks speak…
A Crisis of Brilliance: 1910 and the London
Art Scene In January 1910 Roger Fry had a chance encounter with a young married couple on the platform…
Herta Müller: Nobel Laureate 2009
“who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed” Nobel Prize…
The Schumann Show
Two hundred years ago this February, baby Chopin’s fingers first reached out towards that famous Funeral March. Four months…
Poetry and Politics
Contemporary parliamentarians, in my experience, are not specially attuned to contemporary verse. There are significant exceptions. The former culture…
The Nightingale’s Song
George Beacham was a cattle doctor and a conjuror, a west-country cunning man. His house stood across the lane…
The Curious Case of Cricket and English
Literary Writing The historian George Trevelyan wrote that, if only the French lords had followed the example of their…
Outsleeping the Monsoon
In the purple foothills, the little hours run on light feet like spotted deer in the fallow dark leopard…
How the Snow-Leopard Became
We can barely detect them – Rauschenberg’s white paintings where the only surface interest is the shadow of passers-by…
The Blue Planet
Monks say that icons are written not painted, the gaze always recycled between mother and child. But today reading…
Lough Swilley
I squinted As the light squandered itself Into three plummets – Like votive spears Cast into the scowling water.…
Sur l’Escalier
I have these underwater days, distressed as a little mermaid by memory’s insistent minnowing, a gutted fish, left open…
The Hanging Stone
sing wind sing bracken sheafs sing saxons go away replace their tools with bog-bean spools n cottongrass cambric grey…
You must be logged in to post a comment.