This is Part Five of LIAM GUILAR’S almost completed epic of Britain. Part One was published in Long Poem Magazine #25 Spring 2021, and Chapters Two, Three and Four in The Brazen Head. For more information about Hengist, Vortigern and the Legendary History, visit www.liamguilar.com The story so far. Mid Fifth Century; Hengist and his brother Horsa have sailed to Britain…
The dark back of time – deconstruction in literature and religion
The Good and Evil Angels, by William Blake BRENDAN MCNAMEE says that deconstruction is as old as its opposite Eternity is in love with the productions of time William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Deconstruction is a modern cliché, but it is something much older and more substantive than a passing academic fad.…
‘No Air Native, No Man Kindred’ – extract
Caino (bis) - Wilhelm von Gloeden (Wikimedia Commons) This is Chapter 23 of GOMERY KIMBER's latest novel, No Air Native, No Man Kindred August 1935. A young James Valentine pursues his cousin, Clarissa Wyvern, to Munich. Clarissa is the black sheep of the Wyvern clan, dishonouring the family name by joining the British Union of…
A VOYAGE to OBVERSIA
LEMUEL GULLIVER continues to indite his extraordinary adventures to GUY WALKER WARNING : THIS TEXT FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY CONTAINS DISCRIMINATORY LANGUAGE Before Dawn we heaved Anchor and steered to the West in our Passage to the West-Indies but, for four Days, we were driven by a violent Storm eastwards towards the…
Turned off by the turned on decade
Growing Up: Sex in the Sixties Peter Doggett, The Bodley Head, 400 pages, £25.00 KEN BELL finds a survey of Sixties sex is really about 2020s attitudes In Annus Mirabilis, Philip Larkin reflects famously: ‘Sexual intercourse beganIn nineteen sixty-three(which was rather late for me) -Between the end of the Chatterley banAnd the Beatles' first LP.’…
‘Satyagraha’ – joy and rapture at the ENO
RICHARD DOVE reflects on Philip Glass’s timeless opera In 1960s Lower Manhattan there was a very definite merging of culture and logistics. If you had ordered a new wardrobe or dining table it was distinctly possible that the delivery men could be the two masters of emerging minimalism, Philip Glass and Steve Reich. They both…
Escaping from reality – ‘The French Dispatch’
GUY WALKER greatly enjoys a playful new film, but finds it ultimately insubstantial Early on in The French Dispatch we encounter an imprisoned murderer who takes the art world by storm with an abstract nude painting of a female prison officer, with whom he manages to conduct an affair, secretly painted in his French prison.…
Fernando Pessoa – shadow of a ghost
Pessoa: An Experimental Life Richard Zenith, Allen Lane, 2021, 1,088pp, £40 ALEXANDER ADAMS applauds a comprehensive study of a complicated writer If, after I die, they should want to write my biography, There’s nothing simpler. I’ve just two dates – of my birth, and of my death. In between the one thing and the other…
Refighting the last war
The Armchair General: Can You Defeat the Nazis? John Buckley, Century, £14.99 KEN BELL goes on the counterfactual offensive Many historians like to say that counter-factualism is a waste of time, at least until the port has been around the table twice and then they tend to become as keen as the rest of us…
Punishing treatment
Bleeding for Jesus: John Smyth and the Cult of the Iwerne Camps Andrew Graystone, Darton, Longman & Todd, £12.99 KEN BELL winces through a sad story of sadistic abuse and cover-up John Smyth QC had a public image in the 1970s and 1980s as a conservative activist who worked with Mary Whitehouse in her failed…