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Glimpses of Paradise

Glimpses of Paradise

In the early 1970s, as a young man new to London, I visited the Tate Gallery for the first time. The gallery wasn’t very full on a spring weekday morning, but one middle-aged couple came into the room where I was standing in front of a picture. Obviously, they were intent on doing the whole gallery at a brisk pace as they moved diagonally across the floor, glancing from side to side, like pigeons looking for food. Near the doorway, the woman halted to looked at a painting. She read the label out loud, ‘A Hilly Scene. Samuel Palmer,’ then stood back, and said, ‘My goodness, but it’s so small.’ And then they hurried off into the next room, perhaps to comfort themselves with some huge Victorian landscape.
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The Smell of the Greasepaint

The Smell of the Greasepaint

When the great actor-turned-director Michael Blakemore died in December last year, aged 95, his obituarist on the BBC reminded listeners that, as well as being the collaborator of choice for the play wrights Michael Frayn and Peter Nichols, the guiding hand behind A Day in the Death of Joe Egg and Noises Off, a double Tony-award winner for Kiss Me Kate and Copenhagen, the almost-head of the National and the actual and much-fêted head of both Glasgow Citizens and the Lyric Hammersmith, he was a gifted and iconoclastic author. Personally, the commentator said, his favourite book about theatre was Blakemore’s Stage Blood (2013), a coruscating, vengeful memoir of the author’s five years as an associate director at the then nascent National Theatre.
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Alice in the Margins

Alice in the Margins

The first school play I took part in was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in which Alice was played by a small boy who went on in adulthood to be a judge: evidence if you like for the determinism of early experience, for Alice is the only character, at the climax of the story, to stick up for due pro cess in the trial of the Knave of Hearts. Like most children she has sharply twitching antennae when it comes to injustice or unfairness, both of which she meets on every side. In his Annotated Alice, the editor Martin Gardner draws parallels with Kafka, and there is much in that. Neither author depicts a world with out rules: it is just that the rules are incomprehensible.
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How Sweet the Music

How Sweet the Music

Something rather magical happened to me last summer when, walking along the river path by the Great Ouse in Huntingdonshire, I came across an old iron gate set into a stone wall. A small sign said ‘Visitors welcome’ so I pushed the gate open and found myself in a lovely English garden with some curious details. Ahead of me lay a velvety swath of lawn, edged with a row of dark green yews trimmed neatly into coronation orbs and crowns. Walking further, I discovered more topiary in the shape of giant chess pieces, and rare irises standing tall. Old roses carelessly cast their petals at my feet as I looked up to see a mysterious old house.
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Where Past and Present Meet

Where Past and Present Meet

Lucy Boston’s The Children of Green Knowe (1954) is one of the most enchanting children’s books ever written, set in the perfect time and place. The time is unspecified, but it would seem to be after the war, when trains still stopped at little stations like the one called Penny Soaky. It’s not long before Christmas and there will be snow. It is also a time when a little boy like Tolly, who is 7, can travel on a train to his unknown great-grandmother all by himself.
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Dancing the War

Dancing the War

Towards the end of Modern Poetry, his idiosyncratic book of literary criticism, the Anglo-Irish poet Louis MacNeice tells a story of the great Russian ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. MacNeice is arguing that language doesn’t simply describe experience but complements and informs – perhaps even expands – it. ‘Nijinsky, just before he went mad, got up to give a dance, saying “I am going to dance the War,”’ MacNeice writes. ‘In the same way the poet dances his experiences in words.’
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Scenes from Parish Life

Scenes from Parish Life

Some twenty years ago, inspired by the hymns and sacred music she’d sung at school and in a Cambridge chapel choir, Ysenda Maxtone Graham set out to explore the life of the Church of England. Sustained by British Rail sandwiches and mugs of vicarage tea, she spent a year travelling the country, listening to the views of High Church bishops and newly ordained curates. She talked to believers and unbelievers in their congregations, absorbed the beauty and ancient liturgy of cathedral Eucharist and evensong, and the fervency of born-again evangelical gatherings.
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