Thomas Marks
Contributions
16th June 2015
Green Lanes
Green Lanes. It sounds pastoral, nostalgic, faintly utopian – like some network of ancient drovers’ tracks and holloways that endures furtively in a pocket of deep England. But Green Lanes could h… Read article
26th July 2013
On Sandwiches
A neat, snug study on a winter's night, A book, friend, single lady, or a glass Of claret, sandwich, and an appetite, Are things which make an English evening pass … Read article
23rd April 2013
Five Poems
Autunno After Cy Twombly The sadness breaks tonight it breaks at sevenit cheats all tender efforts to get evenit remembers what I did not we were Autumnand the way it falls away and gives to auburnw… Read article
25th January 2013
On Lodging
Lodger. It sounds a sad thing. Still, whenever talk turns to houses and someone asks if I own, it seems best to own up. I am a lodger. Not a tenant or lease-holder or anything else, but a lodger, rent… Read article
18th October 2012
On Not Sitting Through It
It might as well start with a queue for the Gents: but it starts, when it starts, with a man in a chair. A thick-set man in an armchair, with grey beard and unkempt hair, who’s lowered through a tra… Read article
16th July 2012
On Not Eating Nuts
As soon as I’m shown into the clinic, the specialist wants to know why I’m there. She’s had a long letter from my GP, she says, about some half-remembered symptoms I first suffered aged six – … Read article
9th April 2012
An A to Z of Coach Drivers
Axel had been a gendarme for thirty years, including a stint during the late ’80s when he’d been seconded as a bodyguard to François Mitterrand. He was a short, golden-skinned Breto… Read article
8th January 2012
On Not Being Jewish
At school I was bullied for being Jewish. Sure, I didn’t have to put up with the animal noises that my father had to stomach at a minor boarding school in Hertfordshire in the 1960s. But ‘Jew’ o… Read article
14th November 2011
Albion Street, Lewes
Packs of men, women, and children are rounding the corner of Albion Street with their hands full of fire. The blazing torches they clutch look like matchsticks made for a giant and their flames burn i… Read article
9th October 2011
On Knowing the Words
I have started learning poems by heart again. The first time round, I was six and under orders from Mrs Russell, a primary-school teacher who sometimes said ‘bugger’ loudly in the classroom and wh… Read article
About
Thomas Marks is a writer, editor, and recovering academic. @Tomwmarks