Giggles by Evdokia Charalampous
With her eyes closed
she has been staring at the lamps on the ceiling for days.
By now they must look like Sufi dervishes
whirling in white
to...
Review | Absolute Hell – Pissed In Purgatory
Rodney Ackland’s play ‘Absolute Hell’ (at the National Theatre until 16 June) is like spying on a drunken party through a club door. The...
Short Story Competition: A word from the Judges
With just a few weeks left till the end of our annual Short Story Competition we spoke to the Judges to find out exactly what the short...
Archive | Poetry | The Wiper by Louis MacNeice
First published in the May 1960 issue of The London Magazine (Volume 7, No. 5).
Through purblind night the wiper
Reaps a swathe of water
Two Poems by Sean Borodale
Response to Finding a Fossil at Writhlington Coal Batches:
A Fossil (a Fern) on Writhlington Batches Re-Take (Pt.II)
Time not as we know it
but another time...
Review | Break.up by Joanna Walsh
The online world often seems clean and seamless; it doesn’t have any scars to reveal its traumas or accidents. Bodies, on the other hand,...
Blessed Is the Road On Which You Are Travelling Today by...
Tuesday, 14 February 1989
You had never heard of the word until an hour ago, but already your designers are as familiar with the concept...
An interview with Gwilym Jones
There’s something about the unpredictability of a storm that arouses excitement and chaos in a reader, writer, or just your average passerby on an...
Seamus Heaney and Jan Hendrix: A Shared Landscape of Inspiration
The long friendship and collaboration between Seamus Heaney and Jan Hendrix has been hitherto a little known story and began on paper and in...
Fiction | Alone with the Tide by John Saul
At last. Dismissing all fiction, I come clean. The figure coming into focus, in that smart black and grey coat, unbuttoned, collar up, is...
Bram Bogart at the Saatchi Gallery
SALON, Saatchi Gallery’s commercial exhibition space, launched earlier this year with a fascinating show by the post-war Japanese artist, Tsuyoshi Maekawa, and in keeping...
This Land by Josie Ferrante
A feathery touch brings me round. Gentle, like the light summer rain back home in Wiltshire – thin drops patter on my face and...
Archive | Poetry | Peter Bland
Peter Bland, the New Zealand writer and actor, has written extensively over his long career, and has been lauded with many accolades, among them...
Review | The Monstrous Child at The Royal Opera House
The newly refurbished Linbury Theatre in the Royal Opera House is having its first opera performances with the world premiere of The Monstrous Child,...
Interview with Senior Curator Daniel Robbins
Heather Wells interviews Daniel Robbins, Senior Curator of the Leighton House Museum talking about the current exhibition, A Victorian Obsession.
Thank you for letting us...
Poems on the Underground
If for some reason you ever find yourself playing 'Tube Bingo' there a few things that you are guaranteed to be able to cross...
La Bohème at The Cutty Sark
Puccini’s La Boheme has long elicited a powerful emotional response from its audiences, but rarely have the cast been close enough to see its...
Review | Lee Krasner at the Barbican
Lee Krasner’s work was central in the proliferation of abstract expressionism in the United States. A new show at the Barbican, Lee Krasner: Living...
The Trials of Oscar Wilde, Trafalgar Studios II
The Trials of Oscar Wilde is currently showing for its last week at Trafalgar Studios, formerly Whitehall Theatre. It is co-written by John O’Connor...
Poetry | Waking Under the Walnut Street Bridge by Mara Adamitz...
let me persist but not divide let me sit
quietly with the tiniest ...
The History of Modern France by Jonathan Fenby
Do we really need another history of France when Amazon already carries so many? This one is on the two centuries since Waterloo, making...
Extract | Flogging a Dead Clothes Horse by Thom Cuell
The following is an extract from We’ll Never Have Paris edited by Andrew Gallix (3:AM Magazine) — a new collection of fiction and essays...
Public Library by Ali Smith
It seems somehow wrong that I now ‘own’ my copy of Public Library, Ali Smith’s fifth collection of short stories. For Smith, books are...
The Daylight Comes With Me by John Darwin
Leave the world alone and close the door,
seal this room from everything outside,
nothing else exists but these four walls;
we have eight hours and five...