A Different Kind of Weather: A Memoir, William Waldegrave, Constable & Robinson, 2015, 320pp, £20 (hardback) The political memoir…

Joshua Reynolds: Experiments in Paint The Wallace Collection 12 March 2015 – 7 June 2015 The most important image in…

  The Disappeared, Roger Scruton, Bloomsbury, 2015, 292pp, £11.99 (paperback) Roger Scruton is employing ever more subtle means in his…

  The publication of Seamus Heaney’s Selected Poems in two volumes by Faber lends support to the convenient idea that his is…

  A Woman Without a Country, Eavan Boland, Carcanet, 2014, £9.95 (paperback) Faithful and Virtuous Night, Louise Gluck, Carcanet, 2014,…

  Transactions Gillian Ayres: New Paintings and Prints, The Alan Cristea Gallery 13 April 2015 – 30th May 2015 Giacometti…

  ‘It is too far south for spices and too close to the rim of the earth to be inhabited…

  On a rushy hillside in Lubitavish, Co. Antrim, a group of stones overlooks Glencorp and Glenaan onto Scotland. An…

  A warm night in San Francisco, October 1954. Weldon Kees is enjoying an evening’s jazz. In nine months’ time,…

  Dictes moy ou, n’en quel pays, Est Flora la belle Rommaine? Archipiades ne Thais Qui fut sa cousine germaine?…

  The man enters with an axe. He is whispering to himself or maybe talking to the axe, as if…

  I An offering of grain; an offering of drink. Blind tiger forgive us for making you a stuffed head.…

  This great beech merges with my life. Each day its canopy of wind-carved branches filters nuances of sun as…

  Come October my father would get the urge for musty woodland. On Sun- days he would shake us gently…

  Outside, night has shaken its sleeve. Moths mob the street lamp, dozens of tiny mandibles tear and munch. The…

  Meredith Oakes is the eleventh writer in the My London series. She is a playwright, librettist and translator who…

  1 Scimitar in the January sky – it starts again, the moon as resurgent emblem. ‘Renewal’, so its tacit…

  A breathless train ride in the heat of things, I squeeze my red knees to the rough skin of…

  Among novels by Forster, The Longest Journey seems to have been the least written about independently – not as…

  We’d been sleeping in separate rooms for two months. Denise said she needed to get her head straight. I’d…

  Like a first love, the man you made from words instead of from snow, fitting him together like a…