Letters
‘I’ve taken to sleeping in my teeth’ – the wartime admissions of T.S. Eliot
‘I’m getting to be a wambling old codger’…‘I haven’t got enough phlegm to undress’, writes the poet, exhausted by readings and broadcasts, in letters spanning 1942-44
Alexander Pushkin – Russia’s greatest letter-writer
Intimate, earthy and uninhibited, Pushkin’s letters, collected together, read like a novel and give an encyclopaedic view of 19th-century Russian life
The boundless curiosity of Oliver Sacks
The neurologist’s diverse interests – from colour blindness to cephalopods – are strikingly evident in letters to family, friends and patients, as well as his unfailing courtesy and compassion
The troublesome idealism of Simone Weil
Hailed as ‘an uncompromising witness to the modern travails of the spirit’ , Weil also exasperated those closest to her with her ambitions for heroic self-denial
A romantic obsession: Precipice, by Robert Harris, reviewed
In the build-up to the Great War another drama unfolds, as the Prime Minister H.H. Asquith is seen to be distracted from politics by his infatuation with the beautiful Venetia Stanley
‘There are an awful lot of my paintings I don’t like’, admitted Francis Bacon
While waspishly dismissive of many of the 20th century’s greatest artists, Bacon was also critical of his own work, in conversation with David Sylvester
Emily Dickinson was not such a recluse after all
Far from being closeted in her bedroom, her letters show that she was still travelling in her mid-thirties, and taking pleasure in gardening and the glories of nature
Lord Byron had many faults, but writing dull letters wasn’t one of them
Andrew Stauffer traces the poet’s tumultuous life through some of the most remarkable missives in the English language
Music was always Anthony Burgess’s first love
A gifted pianist and composer, Burgess combined his talents in a superb series of music reviews, published for the first time in a complete collection
An insider’s account of the CCP’s stranglehold on China
A high-ranking intelligence officer leaves a cache of letters revealing his increasing disenchantment with the party after being purged numerous times
Pretending to be himself
Seamus Heaney’s letters are full of energy and joie de vivre, but a darker note persists as the pressure of celebrity grows, says Roy Foster
Under a green sea
How, between 1911 and 1917, Owen became the dazzling poet we know and love is the story told in Jane Potter’s new edition of his selected letters
A talent to abuse
The nonagenarian’s critical faculties are as sharp as ever in these imaginary letters addressed to Kingsley Amis, Jonathan Miller, Doris Lessing and many others
The give and take of friendship
Claudia FitzHerbert explores the complex bond between two remarkable writers in the interwar years
Secret assignations
Adam Sisman on the private life of John le Carré, revealed in letters and a kiss-and-tell
‘He couldn’t help being a bit surreal’
Love him or loathe him, Lucian Freud was a maverick genius whose life from the off was as singular as…
Musicals with a message
Tolstoy or Dostoevsky? Picasso or Matisse? Lennon or McCartney? Impossible to call? No such quandary with Rodgers and Hart and…
Send off
The joys of editing a newspaper letters page
Flashes of brilliance
Funny old life, eh? Small world, etc. In one of those curious, Alan Bennett-y, believe-it-or-not-but-I-once-delivered-meat-to-the mother-in-law-of-T.S.-Eliot-type coincidences, it turns out…
Kindred spirits
‘Dearest Gwen,’ writes Celia Paul, born 1959, to Gwen John, died 1939, ‘I know this letter to you is an…
The preoccupations of a poet
In her essay ‘A House of One’s Own’, about Vanessa Bell, Janet Malcolm says memorably that Bloomsbury is a fiction,…
Putting on a brave face
San Francisco is a fantastic place… it’s terribly sunny… I am having a splendid hedonistic time here… I find myself…
Poet on the brink
‘A matter that hurts me is that I have made many hundreds of people laugh, in various cities, during the…
A fine bromance
This book has appeared with no fuss or fanfare and yet by any account it is something of a scoop.…
Longing to be wanton
Once in a while, just at the right moment, a truly gorgeous real-life love story appears out of the blue,…
