I blame the Rosetta Stone. Early for a meeting near the British Museum, I took a detour to revisit the ancient artefact. It’s inscribed with the same words three times over: first in hieroglyphs, then Demotic, and finally in Ancient Greek. It’s both beautiful as a carved object and revolutionary as a decoder of hieroglyphic […]
If I hadn’t been kneeling on the ground fumbling for my lost earring, I wouldn’t have noticed the low, drystone wall made of leftovers. Parsimonious builders, restoring a fourteenth-century chateau in Provence, had scooped up all the spare bits and turned them into something else. The elegant arch, which once graced the front door, is […]
This is an exercise in looking at things in extreme close-up. It’s meant to give you a refreshing new perspective, although it’s perfectly possible that you won’t have a clue what I’m on about. There’s a vivid, yellow landscape in Amsterdam’s magnificent Van Gogh Museum called Wheatfield with Reaper. Its particular pathos comes from […]
This is a split post: it’s split between India and Manchester, has split and unsplit peas, and argues the case for the split infinitive. There are rules about writing that I’m strict about: the incorrect use of apostrophes, pairing a plural subject with a singular verb (and vice versa), using too many adverbs, and reaching […]
Mise-en-abyme may sound a cumbersome phrase, but when you try to describe what it actually means – the placement of a thing within a larger copy of itself, ad infinitum – its three words sound downright economical. (One of the most famous mise-en abymes is Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Wedding, in which the married couple […]
The theory is this: go to California and marvel at the fresh produce, the creative cooking, the inventive combinations. But some theories disappoint; ask the American women persuaded to wear wooden-slat bathing costumes in the 1920s – they could have told you a thing or two about dashed expectations. Aside from marvelling at a […]
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on […]
The former American Poet Laureate Billy Collins once played a trick on me. I interviewed him for a BBC Radio 4 books programme about his luminous poetry collection Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes. But one of the poems, ‘Paradelle for Susan’, seemed to occupy the embarrassing territory that sits between the experimental and the disastrous: […]
It’s nearly three decades since I studied medieval literature at university. This afternoon I searched out my copies of The Vision of Piers Plowman, Le Morte Arthur and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to give to my son who’s about to go to university to study English literature himself. It’s a sobering reminder of […]
Studying the novels of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre at university, I invested in a packet of Gitanes and listened to Juliette Greco on vinyl; moving on to James Joyce, I took up Guinness and spoke in impossibly dense sentences. D. H. Lawrence was out of fashion then, or who knows where that […]
Gardeners, writers and artists have always understood the value of the number three: less boringly symmetrical than two, more complex than one. Where would Flaubert, Chekhov or Constance Spry be without it? And scriptwriter Steven Moffat, whom I admire hugely, clearly loves it; he named one of his Doctor Who episodes ‘The Power of Three’ […]
Eating with a book is one of the great pleasures. Eating while talking about books is another, and second to that comes talking about books that have eating in them. I once gave a lecture at Newnham College, Cambridge about Virginia Woolf. Newnham was the venue for Woolf’s talks about women and fiction which formed the […]
It can be useful to sit in someone else’s chair every now and again, if only to scuttle back with relief to your own. I’ve been sitting in B. S. Johnson’s seat this week, imagining his frustration at having his experimental novels widely praised but rarely bought. Johnson’s finest work, The Unfortunates, published in […]
My praise for the soothing, regular, oblong qualities of justified text in my last post, The Justified Greengage, provoked some people to question my sanity and judgement. Apparently, only justified left, raggedy right, will do. In my defence, I’m teaching myself the art of letterpress on my dad’s Victorian printing press, so it’s only in […]
Like a summer dahlia frozen in ice, this post is possibly slightly perverse (the flower-freezing thing isn’t always daft – sometimes it’s edible.) I have a slightly sinking feeling that what I’m about to embark on may repel before it entices. But, as with my posts on Fermat’s Last Theorem and the French writer Raymond Queneau, it […]
