Ictus

   Great to receive the new PN Review last week after a bit of a lapse on my part. Among new poems by John Ashbery and fascinating essays o...

  Graham Robb's enthralling biography of  Balzac (1994) unspools a narrative as picaresque, improbable and multitudinous as any of its...

   Peculiar goings-on at the 2012 Forward Prize the other week - they've only gone and awarded it to one of the world's most ...

  To Cafe Oto in Dalston last week for an evening of compositions for electronics, tapes and radios by John Cage, performed by the ensemble ...

    When I mentioned Hope Mirrlees in the previous post it reminded me that I'd planned to re-up the review of her Collected Poems whi...

   The craze for anthologies in recent years has often seemed a market-lead phenomenon pandering to readers' increasingly short attentio...

 Beautiful fusion between Ethiopian and Indian musicians in this multi-textured jam - Ethiopian vocalist Gigi leads the way, with Bill Laswe...

  After a fairly lengthy break from downloading music from the blogosphere, the other day I checked out some of the 'sharity' blogs ...

Summer has come to this: the sky invaded by parachutes of cloud; abrupt random downpours no sooner sheltered from than giving way to pre...