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ONLINE Only: The Empress's New Clothes

Frances Weaver — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 11:43:46 +0100

Author:Nichi Hodgson

"To quote Jean Cocteau, ‘Art often starts out as ugly, but becomes beautiful'. With fashion, it's the other way round." So began Stephen Bayley as he rallied against the motion, 'Fashion Maketh Woman', at Intelligence Squared's final summer series debate in Westminster last month.

Chaired by former Harpers and Queen flaneur, Peter York, each of the six panel members employed their own elegant encomium as they attempted to woo the overwhelmingly female audience. For the motion was Paula Reed, Style Director of Grazia magazine, business woman and designer Britt Lintner, and Madelaine Levy, Editor in Chief of analytical fashion magazine Bon International. Uniting with Bayley against it were artist Grayson Perry and psychotherapist and writer Susie Orbach.

What are Universities For?

Frances Weaver — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 14:18:30 +0100

Author:Nigel Biggar

No Ivory Tower: Oxford, as seen in a pre-war Great Western Railway poster, has always played a public role (Getty Images)

Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin's cultural enforcer, opened his address to the 1948 Moscow Congress of Composers thus:

Forbes at the Festival

Frances Weaver — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 13:29:15 +0100

Author:Allan Massie

Adam Forbes, a Scots writer, unable for reasons he had never defined to live in Scotland, or indeed to write much, was an unlikely person to have been invited to speak about Scottish literature at a festival — itself equally improbable — held in a small town in the Tuscan Maremma. He had never heard of the town, and the region, which he didn't know, was associated in his mind with a shaggy white sheepdog and with a book — a novel? Short stories? Essays? — by Ouida. He had never read it, but could picture where it had stood, brown-covered, on a shelf in his second wife's bedroom. It might still be there, though it was he, not Arabella, who had bought it.

Yes, Of Course I was Wired Weird'

Frances Weaver — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 13:00:49 +0100

Author:Chris Woodhead

Outside, a waterfall from a blocked gutter flowed down the kitchen window. Three sodden and rather stately sheep trooped by in single file. Geoffrey looked at me across the table and nodded with satisfaction. "I love weather like this," he said, "Don't you?"

I nodded back. You don't, after all, buy a farmhouse halfway up a Welsh hillside for the joys of perpetual sunshine. He finished his coffee and picked up one of the black notebooks in which he writes his poetry. "I am," he sighed, "very, very tired."

New Poems

Frances Weaver — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 12:55:08 +0100

Author:Geoffrey Hill

SEI MADRIGALI

Is it not strange that thou shouldst weep? So gravid
The sweetest song a burdening: the six
Metamorphoses, of violence and sex,
The sensuous oboe touched by sensual Ovid.

Pan pipes, the syrinx, the Orphic lyre;
The waters of the mere, reedy and full;
Poignant the false-relationed madrigal;
The hunter poised, the watcher with the lure.

The heron's flight out of the reeds is laggard
Yet still it climbs. You could have watched its slow
Navigation of the risen dawn,
Its neck drawn back, prehensilely long-legged,

But you were probably asleep, and I
Display too late my early grief. Too late
Pinions of holding lift and agitate.
The heron crests its high-reared heronry.