Little hole little well of dark staining the lacquer of my tooth little confessor coming close and coming close why are you pursuing me interrogator of the nerve in its garden of blood and moisture its long sleep what secrets can my nerve confess to you what do you want of us your drill and [...]
In keeping with the current vogue for entwining fact and fiction, Julian Barnes’s latest novel is a fictionalised account of Dmitri Shostakovich’s un-easy relations with the Russian state in the days of the USSR. The tentacles of Soviet tyranny would come for the composer at twelve-year intervals: in 1936, in 1948 and 1960; The [...]
When Frank Auerbach first came to public notice – emerged rather than burst – in the 1950s he was noted as a “British Expressionist” in the white hot enthusiasm for the American abstract colourists Clement Greenberg (not to mention the American government) was punting around the world with spectacular success. It was a gross [...]
The story my grandfather told of how he and my grandmother would walk further and further into the woods, until she asked to be left there, was really one about crows, he’d say, and I would not understand. I was young, then, but I wasn’t sure I would have understood anyway. My father told [...]
Tristram Fane Saunders is a poet, journalist and director. His most recent chapbook, Postcards from Sulpicia (Tapsalteerie, 2015), is an illustrated translation of the complete surviving works of Ancient Rome’s only extant female poet. He works on the culture desk of The Telegraph. This is the 16th article in our regular series “My London”. [...]