NON-FICTION: AUTOBIOGRAPHY A Country of Words: A Palestinian Journey from the Refugee Camp to the Front Page, Abdel-Bari Atwan,…

  POETRY I Spy Pinhole Eye, poems by Philip Gross; photographs by Simon Denison, Cinnamon Press, 80pp, £11.99 Poems which…

  POETRY ‘We needed coffee but…’, Matthew Welton, Carcanet, 96pp, £9.95 ‘Voyaging Out’, Peter Abbs, Salt, 80pp, £12.99 ‘As I…

  NON-FICTION: TRAVEL Venice: Pure City, Peter Ackroyd, Chatto & Windus, 416pp, £25 Venice is light. Her finest painters have…

  Six Months in the City On the 15th August 1600 a sixteen-man Embassy from an Arab country entered London…

  I am frequently asked what I missed most during the years of my captivity as a hostage in the…

  Suddenly, the 1990s seem an awfully long way off. Only a while back they were the stuff of recent…

  A sickly child, christened at haste, Anthony Powell was (so he tells us at the start of his memoirs)…

  Abu Dhabi is a city created by decree and it is busy. The cobalt windows of its banks speak…

  Art Scene In January 1910 Roger Fry had a chance encounter with a young married couple on the platform…

  “who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed” Nobel Prize…

  Two hundred years ago this February, baby Chopin’s fingers first reached out towards that famous Funeral March. Four months…

  Contemporary parliamentarians, in my experience, are not specially attuned to contemporary verse. There are significant exceptions. The former culture…

  George Beacham was a cattle doctor and a conjuror, a west-country cunning man. His house stood across the lane…

  Literary Writing The historian George Trevelyan wrote that, if only the French lords had followed the example of their…

  In the purple foothills, the little hours run on light feet like spotted deer in the fallow dark leopard…

  We can barely detect them – Rauschenberg’s white paintings where the only surface interest is the shadow of passers-by…

  Monks say that icons are written not painted, the gaze always recycled between mother and child. But today reading…

  The sand retreats, and out among the steeple-flint, embedded in clay, cicada-people, larval, shadowless people appear along the shingle’s…

  In Hajtovka, behind the grove of trees along the Poprad river, there’s a large limestone rock. Babies grow underneath…

  I squinted As the light squandered itself Into three plummets – Like votive spears Cast into the scowling water.…

  I have these underwater days, distressed as a little mermaid by memory’s insistent minnowing, a gutted fish, left open…

  The year my father died, I went alone to Astrakhan. I was writing my first novel, and needed to…

  sing wind sing bracken sheafs sing saxons go away replace their tools with bog-bean spools n cottongrass cambric grey…