Benjamin Johncock

Tin Men

21^st November 2012

At the time, he hadn’t realised how serious the situation had been. ‘If anything happens to me,’ he remembered his father saying. ‘You have to look after your mother and sister.’ He was 11… Read article

Sofia Walker

Paree, Paree

28^th August 2012

She professed to love this country more than any other. But I sensed that for her, as for M. and Mme Verdurin, the great thing was not to contemplate the country as tourists, but to eat well there, to… Read article

Peter Scott

Rage

9^th March 2012

I never used to get angry. Though there were, certainly, days when a certain thing, perhaps this thing or perhaps that other thing, might have piqued me like a mosquito. Of course there were. I’d … Read article

James Purdon

An Awkward Silence

18^th November 2011

It started on the morning of Armistice Day. Amid the distributed hubbub of Twitter, a few people began to voice surprise at a series of messages posted from the official account of the Public Order Br… Read article

Arthur House

Lunchtime, Ukraine International Airlines

8^th November 2011

We are high in the sky, not far from Chernobyl, as the three-eyed crow flies. I am staring out of the window, wondering how a landscape so unremittingly flat and dull could be known as steppe, when lu… Read article

Peter Scott

Reflections

18^th August 2011

In the analysis and discussion of recent events in England, many have struggled to identify causes, and provide explanations and understandings of behaviour that most hardly recognise. This frustratin… Read article

Peter Scott

Ex Libris

31^st March 2011

There’s a dirty little game to pass the time in libraries. It takes two or more participants, an interest in foreign spines and a nose for the obscure. One player shuffles off for a stroll in the … Read article

Arthur House

Rush Hour, Nairobi

24^th February 2011

Nairobi is often described as the hub of East Africa, but if there’s a wheel attached to it, there’s no way it can be revolving. Not at the moment, at least. I am sitting in three lanes of tra… Read article

Thomas Marks

On Writing and Not Writing

For as long as I have wanted to be a writer, I have been on the verge of giving up writing. In the last five years alone, I have made time not to write: a collaborative prose ramble around London’s … Read article

Olivia Laing

My Grained Ash

30^th October 2012

My grained Ash an hundred times hath broke,And scarr'd the moon with splinters.   There’s a storm coming in over New York. Hurricane Sandy. I’m up late, thousands of miles away on the south coa… Read article

Tim Smith-Laing

Cemeteries by the Sea

30^th May 2012

A few days ago I finished translating Paul Valéry’s Le Cimetière Marin. I was pleased to finish, considering that it must have taken me a little over two years. It’s easy enough to lose track of… Read article

Peter Carpenter

Cambridge

21^st February 2012

‘radiant with bovine life’ (E.M. Forster) ‘It’s raining but I don’t believe it’s raining’ (G.E. Moore)                        i Docks, nettles, self-sown   sycamo… Read article

Thomas Marks

Albion Street, Lewes

14^th November 2011

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

Thomas Marks

Four Poems

26^th August 2011

Afterings The world turned turtle on me. After the footnotes and the remedies, After the mental embassies, The missed alarms and deadline days, The world turned turtle. So now I wait the set of th… Read article

James Purdon

Assange in the Eighteenth Century

20^th May 2011

In a Virginia court room, away from the press, the US government is embarking on a grand jury investigation into the affaire WikiLeaks. Having learned from its mistake — storing classified data in… Read article

James Purdon

On Orford Ness

3^rd March 2011

Late September on the coast of Suffolk, with the sky curdling into low cloud. From the mainland pier, Orford Ness is a low flat slate-grey spit, tapering to a wire of horizon at each end. Between he… Read article

Peter Scott

The Whole Package

24^th February 2011

I’m writing this 30 yards from the Red Sea, sat on a sun lounger in Sharm el-Sheikh. It’s the first week of 2011, and I’m surrounded by British people, bar one young Egyptian man who sells massa… Read article