Douglas Dalrymple on Before Philosophy, Black Elk and Catholicism... My paternal grandfather’s sympathies were evenly split, I think, between cowboys and Indians. When he died, my grandmother begged me to take a few items from his closet. I kept a button-up cowboy shirt with a nighttime western scene stitched on the ... Read More...
General
Steerforth lifts the lid on Gerry Anderson's worst idea - an unintentionally grotesque show so awful that it traumatised a generation despite never even making it onto television... In 1966, at the height of his powers, "supermarionation" creator Gerry Anderson came up with a bold concept for a new television series. He ... Read More...
Nige reflects on the power and meaning of still life painting, in the light of a book by American poet Mark Doty... Still Life with Oysters and Lemon is the title of a painting by Jan Davidsz de Heem (above) that hangs in the Metropolitan Museum in New York - or ... Read More...
Big books for small talk... There’s a lot of talk in this world. Indeed, thanks to the technological gizmos on which we now spend so much of our time, we are surrounded by talk. The jibber jabber is constant, whether we get it directly from the mouths of the people around ... Read More...
In his late fifties the great novelist and lecturer John Cowper Powys moved with his companion to a rural cottage in New England. As Jonathan Law reveals in this remarkable essay, the remote setting enabled Powys to give full vent to his bewildering range of manias and eccentricities... In the spring ... Read More...
Nige celebrates a gem of Victorian comic writing... Born in 1803, Douglas William Jerrold was one of those industrious Victorians writers who seem never to have slept. He was a successful dramatist (his first staged piece written when he was 14), a hugely prolific critic and journalist, a famous conversationist and ... Read More...
Douglas Dalrymple on one of the best things about children: their books.... One of the richer returns of parenthood is the welcome excuse to reacquaint oneself with children’s books. There are the old crowd-pleasers, of course, likeAlice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and Kipling’s Just So Stories, Dr Seuss, Curious George, Madeline, Babar and all the wonderful little books ... Read More...
Robert Mighall has travelled from the world of academic literature into that of brands and business. Here's why the boardroom needs to understand the relevance of a very old art form... About 2 years ago I was involved in an unsuccessful Annual Report pitch to a FTSE100 company. When they fed back ... Read More...
The first of a two-part meditation on the mostly morbid music of a marvellous miserabilist. Although he may not have racked up the body count of a Nick Cave or Johnny Cash, the late Lou Reed sang about death more often than many a popular musician. Indeed, he did it often ... Read More...
The biography of the austere and forbidding poet R.S. Thomas is a hoot, reveals Nige... It's not often a biography has me laughing out loud - let alone in the Introduction. But so it was with Byron Rogers' The Man Who Went Into the West: The Life of R.S. Thomas, which ... Read More...
