Metaphysical Prose: The Art of Lydia Davis
If the name Lydia Davis doesn’t mean much to you, never fear: until recently it meant little to anyone,…
Ernest Dowson: London Poet and Absinthe Drinker
2 August 2010 marked a rather unlikely milestone in the legacy of Victorian bard Ernest Dowson; some eighty people…
Aunt Jane was a Fallen Woman, my family said
Her washing line held one dress, Grace Kelly like, large pink flowers blending to the garden. Wouldn’t have fitted…
Round and Round
Full Circle: How the Classical World Came Back to Us, Ferdinand Mount, Simon and Schuster, 438pp, £20 (hardback) I’d…
Political Movements
Raising Dust: A Cultural History of Dance in Palestine, Nicholas Rowe, I. B. Tauris, 256pp, £30 (hardback) At the…
Kleopatra: Room 62
(British Museum) What flung me out of life, I do not know: all I can recall again and again…
Ricky di Portanova
Many believed that Ricky was not a Baron from Naples. His father Paolo was even said to have declared,…
Augustine and the Birth of Autobiography
Men go out and gaze in astonishment at high mountains, the huge waves of the sea, the broad reaches of…
The Extraordinary Persistence of Faith
Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, William Dalrymple, Bloomsbury, 304pp, £20 (hardback) Since writing In…
The Crescent and the Crucifix: Breaking Ties in Massinger’s The Renegado
The Renegado, written by English dramatist Philip Massinger in 1623, is set in Tunis during the reign of the…
Joy Riding
On a morning in Lent, dense with rain, even with the wipers going it’s not easy to see the…
A Talent Too Far
Patrick Procktor: Art and Life, Ian Massey, Unicorn Press, 224pp, £40 (hardback) Patrick Procktor was one of English art’s…
Somnolent Parnassian Slopes
Human Chain, Seamus Heaney, Faber and Faber, 96pp, £12.99 (hardback) The ecumenical title of Seamus Heaney’s twelfth collection is…
Three poems
Camille Alone Camille Claudel to Rodin While I weep, alone in my blacked-out room, you are being fêted: your long-standing…
Banjoes on the Lawn: Scott Fitzgerald and Show Biz
F. Scott Fitzgerald, like other novelists, harboured a desire for the stage. Stuck forever and a day in a…
John Huston: Fine Arts and Films
Long before John Huston became famous as a screenwriter, director and actor, he had studied drawing and painting in…
The Human Dream
Rain, Don Paterson, Faber and Faber, 61pp, £12.99 (hardback) Rain can clear the air, refresh dry perceptions, and wash…
Instructions for a Burial
Bury me in a rut on Clay Pit Hill In a cardboard box to let the worms in quick…