Reading Bellow in Chicago
Last month Donald Trump and I happened to be in Chicago at the same time. He was there for the Republican primary. I wasn't.
20 May 2016
A living celebration of Shakespeare's sonnets
Four hundred years after his death, Shakespeare's works still seem inexhaustible as a source of pleasure and a spur to creative
4 March 2016
Recycling Shakespeare
Hogarth Press has commissioned a series of 'retellings' of Shakespeare plays. First to appear is Jeanette Winterson's take on The Winter's Tale.
22 January 2016
Undergraduate poem comes to light
In 1811, Percy Bysshe Shelley was expelled from Oxford for writing a pamphlet promoting atheism. This wasn't his first offence.
4 December 2015
Strange motivations
I'm grateful to the novelist James Meek for introducing me to a new critical term. Reviewing Jonathan Franzen'sPurity (“From Wooden to Plastic”, LRB, 24/09/15), Meek writes that the first appearance of Leila Helou“is couched in the leaden terms of the Unaccountably
6 November 2015
Truth-telling and the right to publish
The career of the British concert pianist James Rhodes has been anything but conventional. He was more or less self-taught until he was 13.
31 July 2015
Hard times revisited
For three impressive London women born in Bangladesh there were cheering results in the UK election.
19 June 2015