Virginia Woolf could be cruelly accurate in her assessments of people. On 24 April 1925 Robert Graves visited her unexpectedly and stayed too long. She described him as ‘a nice ingenuous...
In the early 1960s, David Hockney made a series of etchings inspired by the poems of Constantine Cavafy; he went to Egypt to discover the places Cavafy had drunk coffee and picked up lovers,...
One of my parents’ favourite Soviet films is called Autumn Marathon. Its main character, an academic translator, is living a double life. Out of divided loyalties rather than greed or...
You have burnt me too brown you must boil me again Veronica Forrest-Thomson i kept having this hunch that pleasure was a philosophy but i...
1 Once I woke up with the actual gilded horns of a cuck and you admired them and assured me I need not fear dreams that pass through the horned gates, but then I turned into a yellow cowfish,...
She started off with A and ended up at B: born in 1743 as Miss Aikin, Anna Letitia died in 1825 as Mrs Barbauld. Poet, editor, biographer, essayist, pamphleteer and children’s writer,...
Normal People doesn’t bear much resemblance to apprentice work. The evenness of Rooney’s attention is a huge asset, page by page, and the sign of an unusual sensibility.
A girl who slept in a truck tyre and walked a year of miles was driven back down through dry forests on a small-eyed bus with drooping heads – to no rooms for a child, but the murderers...
I saw a great performance of Hamlet this spring, at Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine, in a Soviet-era theatre built on a similar brutalist scale to the National in London but with less...
Pictures A picture book of Churches makes clear that the one Stone for the floor is A broken Peter. Overhead vacuity Lifts up the great dome. Pecunia non olet Vespasian taxed Sewage,...
The long poem pre-empts its own significance. We expect more of it and less of ourselves, adjusting our pace and investing in the big picture. Hannah Sullivan’s majestic debut offers...
It wasn’t meant to be like this. If we were destined to push the envelope surely it was by flying a recovered Avro Arrow above the speed of sound? The most we were meant to condemn was the...
At the New Yorker, with her ‘longshoreman’s mouth’ and ‘tongue that could clip a hedge’, Maeve Brennan made her opinions known. Daphne du Maurier was ‘witless’, Jean Stafford a ‘bête...
Empty air is a distraction cut out of another void...
Gunn is fascinated by the idea of unknowing, the moment when clarity becomes open to a space beyond clarity, whether drug-induced or part of a dream.
With this New Greasiness One of them breaks the routine at the office usually – mouths off or is sullen, every once in a while. The man said, ‘You know why I’m here,...
Does sleep count as doing something? Can that trite phrase ‘rest and relaxation’ communicate something true?
After the rain stops you can hear the rained-on. You hear oscillation, outflowing, slips. The tipping-down of the branches, the down, the exact weight of those drops that fell over the days and...