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 ...

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 ...

There is also a more dramatic, and for modern tastes perhaps more psychologically convincing, version of what happened during that dead day between crucifixion and resurrection. This was described in ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

SUPPORTED BY A rail on castors, and requiring the administration of eye-drops by his friend, David Kermani (after a successful op for his cataracts), John Ashbery is nevertheless in fine form. I am in ...

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 ...

Reflecting on it now, however, it seems to me that elegance is a hallmark of A-level writing—A-level because it is not essential for a writer’s getting her point across (as unity, argument, 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 ...

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