An artist in her own right: the genius of Elizabeth Siddal
Her imaginative, edgy sketches, though lacking technical expertise, often look beyond their time to a post-naturalist, symbolist era
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
How ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ plays tricks with the mind
First published in 1798, Coleridge’s masterpiece, about a man obsessed with retelling his story, has obsessed readers ever since, because it never offers up closure
A long goodbye to Berlin
Christopher Isherwood’s experiences as a young man in Weimar Germany would be reworked in his autofiction for the rest of his life
Death in Rome
On Sunday 17 September 1820, John Keats and his travelling companion, the young painter Joseph Severn, set sail for Italy,…
A true bohemian
Jean Rhys lived a vagabond life – but she wrote about gloom and squalor with luminous purity and a poet’s care, says Lucasta Miller
An isolated misfit
Why did W.G. Sebald risk his reputation by telling such strange, repeated lies, wonders Lucasta Miller
Unlived lives
Francis Spufford was already admired as a non-fiction writer when he published his prize-winning first novel, On Golden Hill, in…
Where are Yeats, Eliot and Plath in a new survey of 20th-century poetry?
Shelley famously and optimistically proclaimed that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Adorno famously and pessimistically declared that…
Rushdie at his best – Quichotte reviewed
It’s hard to get your head around Salman Rushdie’s latest novel Quichotte, which has been shortlisted for the Booker. It’s…
