From the house I can see the path that leads to the valley. That is where I will go…

  In 1858 Dickens began his series of lucrative public reading tours, which for the past five years had been…

  It’s already dark when we leave the beach. The sun has dropped below the horizon with a speed that…

  I OLWEN MAY After the cow parsley, after the may, into midsummer as pierce-eyed as a sparrowhawk there in…

  Bearing my unicorn’s horn Above my plucked forehead Bare as an egg – Flood silver, pouch of gold The…

  A year past her death my watch went haywire, not the hours but the days and dates – jumping…

  Go to the garden gray with granite cobbles where daisy, fern and dusty miller wince in sun, where indolent…

  Jean Iris Murdoch, the only child of a father who was a civil servant and a mother who aspired…

  Schooled under the same sign Arduus ad solem – your Latin better than mine – we thought it too…

  Nothing to do – Constance my love – with you, at three, nor some would say with me, at…

  The London Magazine welcomes letters to its editor sent to the editorial office at: 11 Queen’s Gate, London, SW7…

  Stag’s Leap, Sharon Olds, Jonathan Cape, 87pp, £10 (paperback)   Nice Weather, Frederick Seidel, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 102pp, £14.99…

  Where the Indus is Young: A Winter in Baltistan, Dervla Murphy, Eland, 272pp, £12.99 (paperback) Travels into Bokhara, Alexander…

  Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure, by Artemis Cooper, John Murray, 464pp, £25 (hardback) In 1986, Between the Woods and…

The Lost Prince: The Life and Death of Henry Stuart, The National Portrait Gallery, 18 October 2012 – 13 January…

  The World of Georges Lacombe, Musée Maurice Denis, St. Germain-en-Laye and Musee Lambinet, Versailles, 13 November – 17 February…