Latest from the Blog

“When they poured across the border:” Reflections on Leonard Cohen & Ilya Kaminsky
I’ve just finished reading Sylvie Simmons’ excellent biography, I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen, and have been reflecting on the magnificent sweep of his career.

‘I only am escaped alone to tell thee’: Bob Dylan’s Tempest
With Bob Dylan turning 80 last month, when I thought of a song to revisit, my mind went almost immediately to the title track on his penultimate album of original music, Tempest (2012). The song charts the sinking of the Titanic a century earlier in April 1912, and is based on a ballad by The Carter Family…

Give me your arm, Old Toad! Larkin Revisited
“Both conversational and lyrical,” the biographer Claire Tomalin has said. And elsewhere: “he wrote in a tradition that valued formal structure, but his voice is entirely his own…”
Main image: Lewis Chessmen © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.
Blog content: © Benedict Gilbert 2021