Countries real, and seen
Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their children. Image: Wikimedia Commons RICHARD DOVE revels in Akhnaten at the ENO “The thing about Philip Glass is that there’s so much repetition.” A friend pronounces his verdict. Well, yes, but what repetition. The ENO revival in association with LA Opera with the third of Glass’s so-called ‘portrait’ operas, Akhnaten, is…
LIAM GUILAR continues his epic of early Britain The story so far. In the 5th century Vortigern’s attempt to hold the imperial province of Britannia together has been defeated, not by external enemies but by British rebels led by Vortimer, his eldest son. Vortimer is a devout Christian and has invited the Pope to send…
Image: Derek Turner The Waste Land – A Biography of a Poem Matthew Hollis, Faber & Faber, 2022, 524pps., £20 LIAM GUILAR is disappointed by a would-be biography of the landmark poem If any twentieth century poem deserves a biography, it is T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. First published in 1922, it was, and is,…
Spare Prince Harry, Bantam, 2023, 416pps., £20 KEN BELL finds the Prince’s blockbuster book unexpectedly engaging There can be few people in the English-speaking world who have not read a review of Spare, the memoir written by Prince Harry, and it is a pity that so many of those reviews seem to have been written…
Jacques-Emile Blanche 1861-1942. Portrait of James Joyce MICHAEL YOST explores Joyce’s life, work, and theory of art Homer’s Odyssey begins thus: “ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον…” or, in translation: “The man, to me, sing, O Muse, many-sided. . .”His word “polutropon” has been rendered as referring to a man “of twists and turns,” “of many…
DANIEL GUSTAFSSON has published volumes of poetry in both English and Swedish, most recently Fordings (Marble Poetry, 2020). New poems appear in Temenos Academy Review, Pennine Platform, in several anthologies by Black Bough Poetry, and in Sunken Island: An Anthology of British Poetry (Bournbrook Press, 2022). As an occasional scholar, with a PhD in Philosophy, Daniel has a…
Beer-makers, Clapham Common, 1877. Wikimedia Commons Street Food: Hawkers and the History of London Charlie Taverner, Oxford University Press, 2023, 256pps, £30 KEN BELL remembers the street-traders who fed a burgeoning city The image of London street food is a trendy one, with well-paid hipsters eating what they sweetly tell each other is authentic, usually…
Ravenser Odd Michael Daniels, Poets House Pamphlets, 2022, 26 pps, £7 LIAM GUILAR admires an evocation of the eroding East Riding This is Michael Daniels’ first collection – the traditional slim pamphlet. The publisher, Poets House Pamphlets, of Oxford, has produced a fine object, printed on good paper, with understated, subtle artwork to enhance the…
Kafka, self portrait. Photo by Ardon Bar-Hama. Wikimedia Commons The Diaries Franz Kafka, Ross Benjamin (trans.), Schocken/Penguin, 2023, hb., 670pp + xxiv, US$45 ALEXANDER ADAMS welcomes an overdue and sensitive English-language edition of Kafka’s journals There could hardly be a better paradigm of existential modern man, locked within his psyche, struggling to making meaning of…
STUART MILLSON says a Scottish National Party idea suggests a way to preserve the Union The resignation of the SNP First Minister of Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon – welcomed by relieved unionists, lamented by Scottish secessionists (some in tears during interviews on television news) – has brought the relationship between the countries of the United Kingdom…