Archive for Themes

I spent part of last summer writing a long review of Timothy Neat’s two volume biography of Hamish Henderson, the poet and campaigner who made such a profound contribution to the Scottish folk revival in the 1950s and 1960s. The review appears in the London Review of Books, issue dated 3 November 2011.

I think it was in 1992 that I first met Emanuel Litvinoff. I had for some time been aware of his marvellous memoir of Jewish Whitechapel, Journey Through a Small Planet (1972), but I had never found a way of including a discussion of it in the book I was writing about East London at [...]

“The Thread” is a series of discussions run by the London Consortium on Resonance 104.4fm. This programme, entitled “How to Hide” and broadcast on 22 March, was presented by James Wilkes and took the form of a conversation with Sophie Nield, Synnove Fredericks and myself – about camouflage and related matters.

A public lecture delivered at the Architectural Association in London on 8 February 2011.

Another reflection on the western travellers who crossed the Iron and Bamboo Curtains . . .

A letter published under the heading ‘Mirsky is mistaken’ in the Spectator on 11 December 2010.

‘On 1 October 1954, Sir Hugh Casson, the urbane professor of interior design who had been director of architecture at the Festival of Britain, found himself standing by the Tiananmen Gate in the ancient and still walled city of Peking…’ An article in the Guardian Review.

James Vernon’s thoughts on the future of the humanities in British universities.

A review published in Architecture Today (212, October 2010, p. 6).

Alan Sugar and his dreadful would-be apprentices aside, is it likely nowadays that the British media would support a serious inquiry into the all-devouring creed we have come to know as ‘management’?