essays Archives - The London Magazine

Essay Competition 2018 — Winners Announced!

First of all, a huge, huge thank you to everybody who shared and entered this year’s essay prize! Though it…

There are millions of miles of Montessori walls filled with quotations about the virtues of sharing. But you don’t want…

Exposure, Olivia Sudjic, Pensinsula Press, 2018, pp. 127, £6 Exposure, the new book by Olivia Sudjic, elegantly dissects the multi-layered…

I grew up in the 1940s and ’50s when the city’s ethnic groups were more clearly divided and a lingering…

First published in the June/July 1977 of The London Magazine (Vol. 17, No. 2) Of course I stole the title…

In the summer of 1858, after an exceptional spell of hot weather, with temperatures averaging the mid-30s Celsius (mid-90s Fahrenheit)…

André Malraux’s The Walnut Trees of Altenburg (Lausanne, 1943), an underrated masterpiece of the twentieth century, is a difficult and…

Folktales about Drake flourished in the West Country even during his own life-time. He was widely thought of as an…

Accounts of the storming of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg on 25 October 1917 read more like those of…

Having entered my late seventies, I continually receive the painful news of friends dying. This fills me with complex and…

This competition is now closed. As the oldest literary and arts review in the UK, The London Magazine has a long…

Yet some men say in many parts of England that King Arthur is not dead, but had by the…

Once in a while you read a book that sets off an electric charge inside you. Usually it coheres…

Every year, with the anti-climatic regularity of the cuckoo clock’s chirp, another gaggle of English graduates is turned loose…

March 2016 sees the tenth anniversary of John McGahern’s death. Author of six novels, three stand-alone collections of short…

In the years before WW1, Greenwich Village developed a reputation as a bohemian neighborhood with low rents, picturesque, meandering…