Forces To Be Reckoned With
Tim Liardet, The Storm House (Carcanet, 2011, £9.95, 66 pp.) Sean O’Brien, November (Picador 2011, £8.99, 84 pp.) In his…
Between Earth and Heaven
La Wally, Alfredo Catalani, Opera Holland Park, 31 July 2011 It began in 1888 with the thought of snow…
Building History
Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project, Iain Sinclair, Hamish Hamilton, 432pp, £20 (hardback) Since being banned from…
Half a Mirror
Drawing in Ash, William Stone, Salt Publishing, 112pp, £9.99 (paperback) The Game of Bear, Peter Bennet, Flambard Press, 72pp,…
Has Houellebecq Lost La Haine?
The Map and the Territory, Michel Houellebecq (translated by Gavin Bowd), William Heinemann, 304pp, £17.99 (hardback) Michel Houellebecq’s personal…
Wild Life: Recent Books from Agenda Editions
Losers Keepers, Andrew McNeillie, £9 (paperback) The Untenanted Room, James Simpson (with woodcuts by Carolyn Trant), unpriced (paperback) A…
Amateur, Professional, Other: The Camden Fringe
Camden Fringe, various venues, August 2011 Just down the road the St. Pancras hotel sat like a monument to…
‘The Barometer Readings of my Soul’: The Autobiographical Writing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I have conceived of a new genre of service to render to man; this is to offer them the…
In the Shadow of Lorca
Some of the most important Arab poets in the twentieth century have paid homage to and evoked the memory…
The Arab Poet Laureate: An Appreciation of Adonis
Few can deny that the Syrian poet Adonis is a towering figure among contemporary Arab poets and that his…
The Thin End of a Hamburger-Shaped Wedge
While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this…
Strange Incidents in Libya
Of all terrains in which I have operated the desert is the most mysterious. The vast empty distances seem…
W. B. Yeats and Sailing to Byzantium
Sailing to Byzantium did not come easily to Yeats. Notoriously fastidious and perfectionist in the practice of his art,…
Poet vs. Preacher: Milton’s Dichotomy in Paradise Lost
It was of course William Blake who famously said of Milton’s Paradise Lost, ‘The reason Milton wrote in fetters…
The Convivial Pepys
Based on an address given at the Pepys Commemoration service at St. Olave’s on 25 May 2011 On 26…
Rioting: A Very British Business
I do not know why anybody was surprised by the riots of August 2011. You had to be deaf,…
Literary Graves: The Sense of an Ending
The way to Avernus is easy; Night and day lie open the gates of death’s dark kingdom: But to…
The Predicament of the Press
Just two years ago journalists on my former newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, were feted for the extraordinary series of…
Faith, Science and Nature: Owen Jones’s Quest for a New Ornamental Idiom
Few people born in the last hundred years will have heard of Owen Jones, the master Victorian architect and…
First Days of the World (God Speaks)
I hurry with the hare, I’m drenched with the fish, I hide with the weasel, take flight with the…
The Stags
Waiting in the railway station – youngsters laughing, train controllers ushering passengers to their trains while I waited for…
My Brief Career in Medicine
This one believed I maybe had the brains this other that I had the right demeanour but the Schools…
Poem of the Late Tang
In Wat Phanan Choeng, beneath the eighty-foot gold Buddha thronged with prostrate devotees, I’m distracted by a faint tang…
Halloween
We are coming into that time when things are not fully themselves – sky improperly dresses in glint and…