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 ...

TWO CARS ARE moving towards each other on a winter night. It is a country road and there is no roadside illumination. Only the carlights. These beams swerve and shudder and prod the tarmac, the grass, ...

A new translation with an introductory note by Simon Collings. ROBERT DESNOS’ SEQUENCE of surreal puns, ‘Rrose Sélavy’ 1 was composed in 1922-23, when the poet was a rising star in the circle of ...

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 ...

MY GREAT-GREAT-GRANDFATHER George Davies travelled with John Wheeley Gough Gutch, a Queen’s Messenger, on his journey to Serbia in both 1846 and 1847 and left two handwritten travel journals which I ...

WE WERE ALONE in the gardens of the hotel, awaiting fruit cocktails that were not arriving. After the many years that I have come to this country, I should know that time is not the same here as ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...