‘As well as fulfilling a boyhood fantasy of building a hillside village, Portmeirion was Clough’s propaganda piece, the culmination of a career spent campaigning against unchecked “bungaloid growth” by pestering the local authorities.’
O. J. Williams reviews Sarah Baylis’s Portmeirion.
‘Lying upon my bed I see / Full noon at ease. Each way I look / A world established without me / Proclaims itself. I take a book / And flutter through the pages where / Sun leaps through shadows.’
From 1956, poetry by Elizabeth Jennings.
‘Here, then, is the inevitable clarion call to Prynne sceptics: read, read quickly, submit to the strange music, resist the cop in your head, be persuaded to rejoice, let the healing fountain start.’
Will Fleming on J. H. Prynne.
‘At the cinema people ask questions on process, whereas at the outdoor screenings I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a question about process; the audience talk more of themselves, their own experience.’
Lydia de Matos speaks to Andrea Luka Zimmerman.
‘Modern biology strengthens what Darwin already noted: nature experiments constantly with sex and gender, without being reduced to any single pattern.’
Alicia Kopf on Darwin, sexual selection and orchids.
‘If she’s tampering with me and my middlebrow money-grubbing from some supernatural plane, perhaps it’s just another chore to check off for the overachiever who once journaled, “What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless”.’
Melanie McGee Bianchi on Sylvia Plath’s guest editorship of Mademoiselle and Plath’s cult of perpetuity.
‘As someone of mixed heritage, I contain or embody the oppressor and the oppressed.’
Joseph Williams interviews Zakia Sewell.
‘The novel’s central question is this: can afflicted people find community and security outside of the households they were born into, or is everyone willing to manipulate and deceive those around them if the situation calls for it?’
Fonie Mitsopoulou reviews Mieko Kawakami’s Sisters in Yellow.
‘I lean on the Clive James idea that a poem is the only art form where you can order a coffee, and even before the drink has gone cold, you could have written something that will still be read in five hundred years’ time.’
Rishi Dastidar in Conversation with Sarah Howe.
‘Someone who can’t read a book cannot deliberate, cannot think and cannot conceptualise, and therefore is a threat. We couldn’t have picked a worse time to become more stupid than when we needed more intelligence.’
Alex Dommett speaks to Will Self.
‘When something like this happens then the image isn’t merely a banal transposition of reality. It creates a certain reality, of a very particular character, because it has the capacity to go beyond itself. To transcend itself.’
Oriol Ponsatí-Murlà on the advent of photography and documenting the dead.
‘I distract myself with the idea that human beings can be divided into two categories: those who wait, and those who make others wait. If forced to, I’d describe myself as one of those who wait.’
Short fiction by Sergi Pàmies.
‘If we take a closer look at them, flags don’t express the eternal identity of nations but the power relations upon which today’s nation states have been constructed and consolidated.’
Marina Garcés on Catalan flags and nation states.
£20.00
On The London Magazine podcast, we speak to brilliant writers, poets and artists about their craft, inspiration and career so far. New episodes every month.
Ann Goldstein discusses the oxymoron of the ‘celebrated translator’, her early encounters with Italian through Dante and the story of how she became Ferrante’s translator. Goldstein reflects on Ferrante’s unique syntax and style, as well as the broader challenges of Italian–English translation.
‘This is where I say to any budding writers out there: write historical fiction!’
Gurnaik Johal on The London Magazine Podcast.
‘One of the things that the novel is about is different forms of chronology that we mark things by.’
Leo Robson on The London Magazine Podcast.
The London Magazine has a publication history spanning almost three hundred years, and has featured work by some of the most prominent names in literature, from John Keats to Hilary Mantel. In this curated selection, we share our favourite pieces from the TLM archive.
‘Lying upon my bed I see / Full noon at ease. Each way I look / A world established without me / Proclaims itself. I take a book / And flutter through the pages where / Sun leaps through shadows.’
From 1956, poetry by Elizabeth Jennings.
The February 1962 edition of The London Magazine was dedicated to poetry.
Editor Alan Ross spoke to several poets at the time about their craft and thoughts on poetry, including Robert Graves, Philip Larkin, Derek Walcott, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and more.
‘The real merit of British painting is that it is at its best romantic, unclassical, particular, fanatical, self-obsessed and the result of close observation in a misty country that has longish winter evenings.’
A survey of British painters in 1961.
