For my talent is to give an impression upon words by punching, that when the reader casts his eye upon ’em, he takes up the image from the mould which I have made. Christopher Smart One of my favourite Kent walks is through the Fairlawne estate; those parts of it that are public, that is.Read More
A sturdy walking distance from here is Higham, a village midway on the main road from Rochester to Gravesend, with commanding views over the Medway valley and Thames Estuary. Here it was that Charles Dickens in his prosperous later years purchased a house that he had dreamed of living in when a child. His fatherRead More
You led me into the trackless woods, My falling stars, my dark endeavour. Anna Akhmatova, from ‘To My Poems’ (translated by Lyn Coffin) What joy there is in coming across the great work of art that you had not been expecting. The writer new to you whose words say exactly what you had been, unknowingly,Read More
In my ignorance, I had thought that the tomb of Philip Larkin’s poem ‘An Arundel Tomb’ was in Arundel. One day I shall be in Arundel, I thought, then I shall pop into whatever church it is and see it. So it came as a bit of surprise to be wandering through Chichester cathedral, forRead More
Next in these reviews of the year is the year in books. I read a lot in 2018, and it was a vintage year: for books published in 2018, for those I finally caught up on, and (best of all) all those unexpected surprises from times past. I’ve put the highlights into nine categories, withRead More
In the heart of the City of London, at the corner of Poultry and Queen Victoria Street, stands a striking modernist pink stone building. No. 1 Poultry Street is the youngest listed building in the country (it was granted grade II* status in 2016), but the site it occupies has a long history. Tucked aroundRead More
Two things that it may not seem wise to introduce into a television comedy are religion and death. The final episode in the most recent series of the BBC’s Upstart Crow gave us both, and it was the appearance of the latter that I found extraordinary. When can someone die in a comedy, and whatRead More
Back in 1981 one of my favourite haunts was the Albion Bookshop in Mercery Lane, Canterbury. Squeezed into its medieval plot over two floors, tightly-packed books climbed up the shelves to ceiling height, while central islands created alleyways through which I could venture through all – so it seemed – that the world of lettersRead More
Skimming through Twitter early on a Saturday morning I caught sight of a message from the Before Shakespeare project. It invited its followers to come to an event that afternoon to celebrate and explore the history of The Curtain, one of the first London 16th-century theatres, whose archaeological site was only recently discovered. So offRead More
I was in the south-west of Ireland recently, on business matters but with a couple of days extra in which to explore. And so I went to Kinsale. It’s a small town, not far from Cork, located at a river mouth feeding out into the sea, its harbour facing a long cove, beyond which liesRead More