Ripening writing
In this comment on Zbigniew Herbert's Report from the Besieged City (title of both a poem and a poetry collection),...
The urge of bees
A charming way to convey the genesis of ideas or desires, likening them to the urge of bees to make...
A fair request
In an age where you are expected to shout, tweet, bluster and generally blather about everything you do, it is...
The secret of surprise
A pithy tip from one of the masters, succinctly conveyed in Clive James' translation. It's certainly given me food for...
Of golden taps and super-men
An interesting insight by the writer Louis Golding when he visited the Achilleion in Corfu in the early 1950s. The...
Remember, like it or not
Maxim Gorky's (1868-1936) childhood was scored with regular beatings, some life-threatening, by his grandfather. His resilience, emotional as much as...
Sheer from the sea
In 1916, in the middle of the First World War, Louis Golding sailed passed Ithaca. Minds were on other things...
Scum-skinned tide
Something alarmingly contemporary about this polluted surface in Dante's Inferno, especially when he discerns, through the miasma, dead souls fleeing.
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The masonry of verse
A brick-solid image to convey a sense of Anglo-Saxon verse, implying it is precisely constructed and built for the ages. ...
Music as trinity
Aldous Huxley here likens music to the Trinity due to its capacity to say more than one thing at the...
New-grown green
At the precocious signal of spring, I see new-grown green peeping all about. And isn't that a sweet scene, sitting...
As it sounded, so it looked
In the preface to his marvelous translation of Dante, Clive James mentions the poet's pithiness. I can't judge it in...
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