some LANDSCAPES

I have written here often about the importance of a viewing point - one of the pleasures of any walk is finding a natural seat from which to...

  Determined now to rid ourselves of Netflix and save some money, we have started watching a few last films that we hadn't got round to ...

Page from The Classic of Mountains and Seas in the National Library of China The Chinese Classic of Mountains and Seas , the Shanhai jing ,...

  Still thinking about the landscape of Sicily (above) which we saw on our holiday at Easter, I have been re-reading the Idylls of Theocritu...

  It is nearly a decade since I featured Laura Cannell on this blog soon after she released her debut solo album Quick Sparrows Over the Bl...

 At the brink of dawn, the morne, forgotten, forgetful of blowing up. - Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land   Near the st...

The renowned American poetry critic Helen Vendler died a few weeks ago; there was a nice piece in The Atlantic by Adam Kirsch comparing her...

I was at the BFI this week to see Bitter Rice (1949), a classic Italian neorealist film that also draws on elements of film noir and (in it...

 Office of Sir John Soane, Interior of Hagia Sophia (detail), c. 1806-19   Sir John Soane’s Museum currently has a small exhibition called ...

The Government of Zhejiang Province have recently launched the Poetry Road Cultural Belt. There is a fascinating article on the literary so...

  I'm going to write about landscape in this book, but it needs a bit of explanation first. Here's the New Directions publisher'...

  There is sweet music in that pine tree's whisper... - Theocritus, Idyll 1 , trans. Anthony Verity Last week I was in Syracuse, the hom...

Mentioning Bert Haanstra, a Dutch documentary maker, in my last post reminded me of the great Joris Ivens. I referred to him back in 2008 wh...

This morning I walked along our local canal, with bright sunny weather creating reflections of the barges and bridges, the buildings of Hoxt...

Carl Gustav Carus, Woman on a Balcony , 1824 (used as the cover for OUP edition of The Mysteries of Udolpho ). The Mysteries of Udolpho is o...

  Last weekend I went to Cambridge to see the Kettle's Yard exhibition Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia and Friends. Laura Cumming wrote...

Back in 2022 Tate Liverpool held an exhibition of 'Radical Landscapes'. I didn't make the effort to go because it sounded like I...

Talking this weekend with my teenage son about holiday ideas, we agreed that the place we would both most like to visit is St. Petersburg. I...

Derangements of My Contemporaries is Chloe Garcia Roberts's 2014 translation of Li Shangyin's Za Zuan ('Miscellaneous Notes'...

Conway Castle - Panoramic View of Conway on the L.& N.W. Railway I've been reading Bryony Dixon's book The Story of Victorian Fi...