The Lady in the Van

Alan Bennett, 26 October 1989

... Miss S. spends much of her day sitting on the pavement in Parkway, where she has a pitch outside Williams and Glyn’s Bank. She sells tracts, entitled ‘True View: Mattering Things’, which she writes herself though this isn’t something she will admit. ‘I sell them but so far as the authorship is concerned, I’ll say they are anonymous and that’s ...

Courage, mon amie

Terry Castle: Disquiet on the Western Front, 4 April 2002

... then, too, there are all my mood-setting ‘highbrow’ CDs – the songs of Gerald Finzi, Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth, Gurney, Ernest Farrar. (The baritone Stephen Varcoe is unsurpassed in this repertoire.) I have but to hear the dark opening bars of Finzi’s ‘Only a Man Harrowing Clods’ to dissolve in sticky war nostalgia and an ...

The Tower

Andrew O’Hagan, 7 June 2018

... this story, comes towards the end of July 2014. Two separate sources spoke to me of emails between Peter Maddison, director of Assets and Regeneration at the TMO, and Feilding-Mellen and others, discussing the colour and type of fixing for the proposed cladding on Grenfell Tower. At the time, residents were putting some pressure on the TMO and the council’s ...