Karel Čapek’s Letters from England (1925) “’You must begin from the beginning,’ I was advised, but as I have now been for ten days on this Babel of an island the beginning has got lost. What am I to begin with? Fried bacon, or the Exhibition at Wembley? Mr. Shaw, or the London policemen?” That is how Letters from England…
What if the man you’re rooting for in a wartime darkly comic thriller is also a serial killer? In Mr Bowling Buys a Newspaper (1943), Donald Henderson gives us just that: a shabby, lonely public-school man with a bleak past, a murderer burdened by a morbid wish to be caught. (You can read the novel here.) One aspect of the…
This is the door to the ladies close to the art gallery (visit recommended) within Norwich Castle – an oasis of functional design that we had all to ourselves. There was a nice sliding lock on the stall and a proper chain to pull to empty the overhead tank with a satisfying clank. This of course sent me off on…
In what would have been the week of Seamus Heaney ‘s 86th birthday – here is Clive James ventriloquist. Performed at the ICA in London in 1974: These were the Belfast poets — all called Seamus — Of whom the leading light was SEAMUS FEAMUS, Who even now attacked his midday meal: Two slabs of peat around a conger eel. ‘White spoors of cockle,’…
A murder in a locked room. Whodunit? And more importantly, howdunit? Who would want to kill philanthropist, union organizer, and general do-gooder Arthur Constant? And why? Arthur Constant rents rooms from Mrs. Drabdump in Bow, in London’s East End. Zangwill sets the scene with that essential ingredient of a London mystery—fog: On a memorable morning of early December London opened…
I kept coming across paintings of London by Yoshio Markino – gauzy portraits of a mysteriously colorful, old-world city often shrouded in gray mist or yellowy brown fog but always dreamily evocative of another era that was both familiar and yet eerily distant. Time to find out more. Yoshio Markino: The Japanese Artist Who Painted London’s Fog Yoshio Markino (1869–1956)…
One childhood ritual during the days between Christmas and the return to school was the day trip to London. The main purpose was the January sales and the destination: “the London shops”. Swindon had a department store – McIlroys on Regent Street (it even had those amazing overhead wire and pulley cash railway systems that transported money and sales slips…
I put this image together in honor of the Holy Month that’s now upon us. Given the proliferation of days, weeks, and months dedicated to assorted gender identities, you would be forgiven for thinking that every day, week, and month was devoted to special-gender-identity-recognition and to the victims of heteronormativity which of course is a system of oppression created by…
It’s London in wartime, in the blackout before the Blitz and the streets of Soho are full of characters straight out of central casting. Our protagonist is Scotland Yard’s Detective Inspector Patrick Aloysius McCarthy, a hard-boiled cop with an Irish father and a Neopolitan mother and all the stereotypical traits of both. He’s prone to hunches and the luck of…
Based on his published letters,1940 was a busy year for T.S.Eliot. He was based in London and working at Faber and Faber as editor and director. I’ve picked out a few (mostly) bookish highlights here. In January he enjoyed an evening with Stephen Spender, and tut-tutted about his domestic tangles commenting: The irregularities of that group of young people are…
Norman Pearson returned towards the end of January, after an absence in Spain and Portugal, bearing two bananas, two oranges and a pineapple. The bananas and oranges were simple, Hilda and I had one each. Apart from a few green apples and some berries in Cornwall, it was the first fruit that we had tasted for two years. It seemed…
A recent NYTimes Cooking newsletter from Melissa Clark drew my attention to the article about Raghavan Iyer by Kim Severson Mr. Iyer’s debilitating cancer treatment gave him the idea for the Revival Project, a searchable database of comfort-food recipes, with the goal of nourishing patients with dishes suited to their specific origins, preferences and medical conditions. The recipes are organized by…
In Our Flag Stays Red (1948) Phil Piratin – the Communist Party MP for Mile End – wrote an account of the 1940 occupation of the Savoy Hotel. This is just one of the many stories I came across in the research for the Marienbad – my post about Fritz Stingl and his escape from Czechoslovakia in 1939. Fritz was…
A novel by Kate Atkinson is always something to look forward to and I’ve just finished reading her latest – The Shrines of Gaiety. As always, she does not disappoint. This character-rich, picaresque romp through the underbelly of the world of the Bright Young Things of London in the 1920s is what is known as a good read. The Great…
It’s all a long time ago now but I spent the summer of 1969 playing. With a shiny new degree in Eng.Lit and headed to London University in September to qualify as a teacher. I saw this notice in the college student handout. I went up to London for the weekend, met Rhaune Laslett, spent time on the playground and…