Redefining Chivalry
Yet some men say in many parts of England that King Arthur is not dead, but had by the…
Informing Beauty: Kathleen Raine
Once in a while you read a book that sets off an electric charge inside you. Usually it coheres…
In Search of a Literary Life
Every year, with the anti-climatic regularity of the cuckoo clock’s chirp, another gaggle of English graduates is turned loose…
Remembering John McGahern
March 2016 sees the tenth anniversary of John McGahern’s death. Author of six novels, three stand-alone collections of short…
They Who Surround
The story my grandfather told of how he and my grandmother would walk further and further into the woods,…
The Village: Past & Present
In the years before WW1, Greenwich Village developed a reputation as a bohemian neighborhood with low rents, picturesque, meandering…
About my Father
I drove down to Chislehurst to clear his room, after he died. He’d not been there long, in that…
Scarifying Confrontation: Pericles at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
Pericles isn’t the easiest of Shakespeare’s plays either to like as literature or to enjoy on stage. There are…
Auerbach’s Intimitable Magic
When Frank Auerbach first came to public notice – emerged rather than burst – in the 1950s he was…
The Noise of Time
In keeping with the current vogue for entwining fact and fiction, Julian Barnes’s latest novel is a fictionalised account…
Icons of Desire
Maria Loh ‘examines the subgenre of artist portraiture’ in the 16th and 17th centuries, and defines portraits as ‘the…
Women at War
In April last year a woman holding a camera was shot dead at a check- point in Afghanistan; the…
Modern Tinkering
Every age has a need to retell old stories and legends, to re-clothe the bones with new flesh; which makes…
Risk and Repetition
Should you come upon this book in a shop, or see its title headlined in a review, it would…
Old Possum’s Black Pages
The astonishing two-volume The Poems of T.S. Eliot is a vast cathedral of dazzling scholarly annotation. Years in the…
The Imaginative Mind: Enchantment and Transcendence in John Ashbery’s Collected French Translations
‘Only connect . . .’ wrote E.M. Forster in Howards End. John Ashbery responds to this invitation with his…
A Roman Tombstone at Annaba
My name was – What does it matter? – Paulus Silentiarius It would happen so easily. The harassed mason, busy…
Watching RAF Bombers
By Grasmere mountains, patched like camouflage, Tornados fly in glamorous great-paced dressage, Their pilots like augmented spirits, one With banking…
There are Precious Things
In carriage three of the 4.38 out of Mile End, there are precious things. Tanisha drops breathlessly into a seat.…
To Wine by Jorge Luis Borges
In Homer’s bronze resplendence, your name was seen to shine, you who make glad the heart of man, you dark…
Your Father in Slad Valley
Slad has beguiled generations of men and women to fall on muddy knees and play cider-games under broken hay carts.…
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