Lebanon’s Faultlines
Beware of Small States: Lebanon, Battleground of the Middle East, David Hirst, Faber and Faber, 496pp, £20 (hardback) Spirit…
Fire in the Soul
Fire in the Soul: 100 Poems for Human Rights, Ed. Dinyar Godrej, New Internationalist (supporting Amnesty International), 192pp, £9.99…
Taking the Occasion
Taking the Occasion, Daniel Brown, Ivan R. Dee, 80pp, £13.95 (hardback) Two hundred years on, Wordsworth’s stricture about using…
‘Anything but Gentle’: Henry Moore Revisited
You could wonder about the prudence of presenting Henry Moore to the public for this 24 February to 8…
A Book of Silence
A Book of Silence, Sara Maitland, Granta, 311pp, £8.99 This lively book sets out to restore the importance of…
What to See: Recent Sculpture and Drawings by Jeffrey Lowe
After the death in 1975 of the abstract artist Roger Hilton, Jeff Lowe was driving in Cornwall, where Hilton…
Chekhov at 150: The ‘Hampstead Connection’
For a week this January a galaxy of British theatre people and writers gathered at the Hampstead Theatre to…
Hemingway’s Confessions
The 1920s were Hemingway’s golden age as a man and a writer. In the last half of the decade…
Ivor Novello, 1893-1951
He is box-office poison nowadays but Ivor Novello, at his zenith, dominated the musicals genre and had a large…
Still Crazy After All These Years
2007 I always regretted not going to Matala. One snowy night in the early 1970s I was sleeping on…
On Tapering
In the section of his Modern Painters entitled ‘The Truth of Vegetation’ Ruskin claims that in their painting of…
And the Night-Watchman Talks on
What a shame that one of Britain’s greatest short story writers should be remembered for only one story. Actually,…
High Art in the Low Countries
‘In the market place of Bruges/Stands the Belfry old and brown/Thrice consumed and thrice rebuilt/Still it watches o’er the…
With and Without Sam
‘A Ditty Full of Old Muck’ The London Magazine has great pleasure in publishing the following two extracts from…
Io’s Sisters
The usual English summer: early heat stoking speedwell, dog’s mercury stealing a march, then months of drizzle until rosehips…
Two Poems
Star Matter Orion’s plump root hangs upended beside the jogger’s wet reflection on the sand. Or hung this way eight…
Two Poems
Scent of Words Sleeping last night In dark-lightness Poetry seeping from my eyes onto my pillow No strength to wake…
Lawn and Leaves
On the wind, the leaves come down like birds Flocking to a lawn where the grass is green and…
Two poems
For Our Lady of Guadalupe The taxi has a broken windscreen, lightning-starred with a crack from one corner: signature of…
Brindle Revisited
A sour wind howls down Duxon Hill, weeds lengthen in the cobbled yard, the lime trees on the lawn…
A Month in the Country
XVII How many kinds of mist? And times of mist? How many places for the mist to close over…
Two poems
Pele (goddess of lightening dance volcanoes violence) Night smells of tuberose Do not breathe its addictive darkness too deeply. Take…
In the Black Country
(for Roy Palmer) Brush the sooted trees at Cradley, Tramp the ironworks’ ash at Brierley, Taste the coal-dust, swirled…
Three poems
Condensation on a windowpane 1 I want to write something simple, something simple, few adjectives, ambiguities disallowed. Something old-fashioned: a story…