Bartók's "Duke Bluebeard's Castle" currently being staged by the English National Opera at The Coliseum and paired in a double bill with Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" – that score still breathtaking after all these years – is a powerful work,...

The media obsession with cultural anniversaries is not always complete – look how the books pages missed the fact that this year, nearly over, has been the centenary of Malcolm Lowry – but here's one you definitely haven't thought of. This month...

I have just finished a fine new collection of poems by the Irish poet and novelist, Martina Evans, called Facing the Public and published by Anvil (£7.95). This is one of the best collections I have read for some time, drawing deep on her experience...

I step into Stanford's travel bookshop in Covent Garden and what do I see: I have finally become part of that doubtful company: the Three For Twos! The evidence is in this picture that my A Corkscrew is Most Useful: The Travellers of Empire (Abacus,...

One of the joys of having finally turned into my publisher a big non-fiction book is that I can return to poetry and I have just come across a glorious (untitled) poem by Elizabeth Bishop written some time in the late 1930s and published for the first...