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, 18:00 PM
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, 18:00 PM
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, 18:00 PM
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, 18:00 PM
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, 18:00 PM
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, 18:00 PM
Hard times revisited
For three impressive London women born in Bangladesh there were cheering results in the UK election.
19 June 2015, 18:00 PM