I admire the mediæval cathedrals as much as anybody, and I am perfectly prepared to recognize the greatness and uniqueness of mediæval craftsmanship. But I believe that æstheticism must never be used ...

Our discussions as intense as in that bar back in Baghdad, Back in the bad old days that now look good. Each poet rises to proclaim a eulogy. Anthony notes how Semitic most of us look. Big noses and ...

A Fortnightly Serial. By ALAN WALL. Chapter Twenty-Nine. The Blues in Paris CHARLIE TOOK his thesis with him. He would give it to Jennifer with all the corrections when they returned. He was still ...

EMILY OLDFIELD HAS flair. Her first collection is a hotpot of poems taking their substance from a wide range of experience and response, with a good sense of how words work with and against each other ...

From the word go, Sudhir Kakar’s book on psychoanalysis and non-Western civilizations promises to be entertaining as well as enlightening. Initially he points out that most of our knowledge on how ...

OLIVE CUSTANCE WAS the long-suffering wife of Lord Alfred Douglas, the beautiful young man over whom Oscar Wilde lost his reputation, livelihood and family. But at the same time Lord Alfred was ...

JOSEPH BRODSKY HAD an extraordinary life, yet there is no biography or edition of his letters and all readers lack the essential context for a complete understanding of his poems. The Soviet ...

Some time ago it was the fashion, and perhaps it is so still, to append to the title of a novel the words: a true story. Well, that is a little innocent deception … —Georg Christoph Lichtenberg.

THE LANGUAGE OF Khaled Hakim’s “letters” is not standard written English, but neither is it the spoken language, nor is it dialect (though there are traces of accent). It is simply the English of ...

BENJAMIN TELLS US the allegorist so conquers the meaning of the texts or objects falling under his gaze that when he has finished they can appear merely the dead husks of themselves, having yielded ...

Arab slavers prey upon the tribes. Leopold’s ghost will never sleep, Pinched and prodded everywhere by amputated hands. Allah and Jehovah have both behaved like vultures over Africa, Imagining a ...

A Fortnightly Review Wood Circle By John Wilkinson The Last Books | 64pp | $19.95 £16.44 By RUPSA BANERJEE. JOHN WILKINSON’S COLLECTION, Wood Circle (2021), unmakes lyric language as it carves out a ...