Alice Spawls

The​ Type Archive near Stockwell in London used to be a hospital for cab horses and circus animals, but since 1992 it has been home to every sort of mould, matrix, burin, bodkin and slug. The archive holds typographical apparatus from the last six hundred years, but its main collection relates to the technology of Monotype printing. That capital letter is important: this isn’t the...

Swimming​ in the wild or nearly wild has grown unrelentingly in popularity over the last ten years, and no one can deny that it feels wonderful: if not at the time, then certainly afterwards. For Londoners the locus of the activity is Hampstead Heath, with its three ponds: women’s, men’s and mixed. There are cold water lidos at Brockwell and Hillingdon and Tooting Bec, as well...

Next door​ to the London Review Bookshop is a firm of architects, Rodić Davidson, who often have interesting displays in their windows. Usually these relate to the tools and forms of their trade, but at the moment they have six stirring, whirling automata created by Paul Spooner. They can be observed in motion on the hour, every hour, but are almost as nice when they are still. Three of...

From​ time to time I’ve had the experience of revisiting a novel only to find that a scene which I thought had made a strong impression on me wasn’t there at all, or only passingly, and that my imagination had done the rest. Pierre Bonnard seems to have painted in this way – as a reader rather than a writer. He didn’t paint from life, but made drawings and noted down...

Eve Polastri​ works for MI5, organising police protection for high-profile foreign visitors. She’s bored, though she doesn’t entirely know it. The girlfriend of Victor Kedrin, a Russian sex trafficker murdered in Vienna, is put in her charge. Eve arrives at the briefing late, hungover, trying to eat a croissant from a paper bag without making a noise. She blurts out that the...