The exasperated spirit

LETTERS

Sibyls , the book born of Ruth Fainlight’s poems and Leonard Baskin’s prints, became a memento of friendship, beauty and sorrow for its author

Dear Simon, Once again, the December 2025 issue had lots of memories to write about. Starting from the front, Gertcha! – I did love Chas and Dave, as did my husband. Of course, the family always watch

Gerald Howard’s The Insider is a crowded but colourful portrait of Malcolm Cowley, poet, editor and chronicler of the so-called Lost Generation – those American exemplars of literary modernism who, li

“Where are we to begin?”, Virginia Woolf asks in her essay “How to Read a Book”. “How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasures from what we read?

“This tremendous aggregate of a book has many of the characteristics of a Festschrift assembled to honour some Great Influencer”: so, in 1973, the architectural historian Priscilla Metcalf began the f