Independent Metaphysics
All in One Breath, John Burnside, Jonathan Cape, 2014, 96pp, £10 (paperback) Terror, Toby Martinez de las Rivas, Faber,…
Here Because We’re Here
The War That Ended Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War, Margaret MacMillan, Profile Books, 2013,…
Nasty, Brutish and Short
The Dead Zoo, Ciaran Berry, The Gallery Press, 2013, 90pp, £10.50 (paperback) Echo’s Grove: Collected Translations, Derek Mahon, The…
Peter Pan Meets Elvis
I Knew the Bride, Hugo Williams, Faber, 2014, 65pp, £12.99 (hardback) Hugo Williams has been called many things in…
Curious Insulations
The Hotel Oneira, August Kleinzahler, Faber, 2013, 96pp, £12.99, (hardback) Nice Weather, Frederick Seidel, Faber, 2013, 112pp, £14.99, (hardback)…
Plath’s Rapist
I The rape of Sylvia Plath was the third traumatic event in her short life. Her father had died in…
A Child of World War I
If World War I had never happened, I wouldn’t be here. My father, John Dudley Lucie-Smith, met my mother,…
A Liberal Flirtation: Edmund Wilson & Sir Isaiah Berlin
Isaiah Berlin affected me like nobody else I had known; though he was not particularly handsome, I tended to react…
My London: The Serpentine and The Sinuous
This is the sixth of our series in which writers say what London has meant to them. Holly Luhning…
William Blake and the Forging of the Creative Self
William Blake and the Forging of the Self
T. S. Eliot and La Figlia Che Piange
Today’s younger readers approaching T. S. Eliot’s poetry for the first time are faced with two alternatives. They can…
The Estuary
A water where the ebb-wave, flood-born is flood-broken yet the wave wavers and transports me through the river’s dam…
The Moment Before Touch
The air grows still. As in an illustrated weekly I leaf through your eyes. To hear silence as it…
What If
If he truly believed in angels they would appear, I said in a dream (of whom I spoke I…
Helen Thomas visits Ivor Gurney in the City of London Mental Asylum 1932
i Dear Ivor, no wonder you are elsewhere Than here, the park outside a parody Of your rolling Cotswold…
A Question of Desire
A long time ago when I was young and when much of the world was still coloured red on…
Downstream the Water Darkens
There are only a few days before we have to go home. Summer is nearly over. A flash of…