The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws And grasses in the mead renew their birth, The river to the river-bed withdraws, And altered is the fashion of the earth. A. E. Housman,‘Diffugere Nives’ (Horace, Odes IV.vii) A poem to celebrate a golden harbinger of spring in Sussex:
Three years ago, Kathleen and I produced a short film to mark International Women’s Day and to celebrate the special contributions of West Hampstead’s former residents to the cause of women’s emancipation. We reprise the film here to acknowledge the centenary of the first legislative step towards women’s suffrage in Britain.
Google has today created a new ‘doodle’ to celebrate Virginia Woolf’s 136th birthday. And so, it seems timely to reprise our little film which features my sonnets about Virginia and her last home, Monk’s House, here in East Sussex. Towards the end of the film, you will have heard Emily reading, so beautifully, an excerpt
Geraldine Stephenson, movement teacher and choreographer, died on Christmas Eve. Philip [Prowse, director of The Duchess of Malfi, NT 1985], I discovered, had instinctive choreographic flair. Even in the rehearsal room, with four or five actors standing about as courtiers in their street clothes, he would offhandedly gesture to suggest a shift of position and the
It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing … A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It’s the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong. Tom Stoppard, Arcadia A
My life has often been marked, and enriched, by the most remarkable coincidences; and sometimes the coincidences come not single spies, but in battalions (or at any rate in small clusters). This Christmas Eve I thought I’d share with you a very recent brush with serendipity. In addition, I specially want to thank all of
Two Christmas poems, the first a sonnet to camera in tribute to my mother: And: A Night Before Christmas (17 December 2017) Waking in the small hours No hope of heavenly hosts amongst the empty galaxies But on this spec – this spinning ball – our world – My iPhone, balanced on the bedside table, Brings tidings
Recently I took part in an exploration of theatrical lighting conducted by Fiona Shaw for Radio 3. Fiona and I appeared together in The Rivals at the National Theatre in 1983 – it was her first juvenile role at the NT and my last. The programme airs on Christmas Day at 6.45pm and is called Illuminating
A trailer for my play Pillar Talk which I first performed at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2005 and which is now available for the first time on CD. For information on how to purchase, please visit BRAINFOOD AUDIOBOOKS UK.
One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin. Virginia Woolf As the grey and chill of winter set in, a short sequence of poems inspired by