‘The dead shall look me through and through’ Tennyson, In Memoriam A. H. H. As a boy, I read excitedly about the Egyptian Rooms at the British Museum, where night watchmen reported unexplained drops in temperature, feelings of being watched, and, on at least one occasion, a terrifying apparition of a bandage-clad mummy with contorted… Continue reading
Posts Tagged → Peter Ackroyd
A postcode in play
Spitalfields: The History of a Nation in a Handful of Streets Dan Cruickshank, Random House, 2018 Every morning, I would be awakened by the cockerel across the road, and open the curtains to see an array of the east, each new sun lending brilliance and blue-hazed suggestiveness to eastern Middlesex and western Essex. Bow lay… Continue reading
Spirit guide
Ghostland, Edward Parnell, London: William Collins; 2019, £16.99 ‘Always the ghosts’, Edward Parnell remembers, looking back over his Lincolnshire childhood. After the daydreaming 1960s, the sudden uncertainty of the 1970s manifested itself in bitter tension and a fascination with all things folkloric and paranormal. Into an unsettling world of candle-lit houses and angry political noises… Continue reading
The world-island of England – review of The Island by Stephen Walter
THE WORLD-ISLAND OF ENGLAND The Island: London Mapped Stephen Walter, foreword by Peter Barber, London: Prestel, 2015, hb., 143 pps., £15.30 It is a cliché to say London is unlike the rest of England. It is original to take this trite conceit one stage further, and depict the Great Wen as an actual island, set… Continue reading