According to Philip Larkin: We know what he meant. Human beings were making the beast with two backs long before 1963, as Larkin — born in 1922, vigorously heterosexual, never married — surely knew, but the place of sex in our lives — in our society, in our imaginations — underwent some kind of radical... Read More

October in the northern hemisphere is, let's face it, a melancholy month. Walking the dog through the quiet streets of our bosky suburb one chilly morning, a mild wind came up, filling the air with downwards-drifting dead leaves in slow showers. The pop-music standard Autumn Leaves of course surfaced in my head and got stuck... Read More

Because I don't know the Bible very well I often get caught out by scriptural references. So it was the other day when I was browsing my September 2024 issue of The New Criterion. That magazine always includes some original poetry. The poet in this issue was George Bradley, whose most recent collection, Late Montale,... Read More

I have thought, ever since reading his 1959 classic The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, that Erving Goffman's distinction between the "front" and the "back" is a good starting-point for a lot of sociological commentary. Here I was, for example, diarizing about a trip to Mexico that we enjoyed six years ago: The performing... Read More