Peter Parker

Rooms with little left to view: the queer spaces of E.M. Forster and others

2 September 2023 9:00 am

Diarmuid Hester goes in search of the private places of eight remarkable figures from the 20th century, to find only Derek Jarman’s cottage preserved intact as a shrine

The frustrated life of John Singer Sargent

12 November 2022 9:00 am

At Tate Britain this year, for the first time since 1926, nine of John Singer Sargent’s brilliantly painted and affectionately…

Forgotten books worth rediscovering

8 October 2022 9:00 am

Most readers have favourite books or authors they feel have been either forgotten or unjustly neglected. R.B. Russell, an assiduous…

The well of happiness – and despair: Queer St Ives reviewed

23 July 2022 9:00 am

In the winter of 1952 the 21-year-old sculptor John Milne travelled to St Ives in Cornwall to take up a…

We could all once tell bird’s-foot trefoil from rosebay willowherb

2 July 2022 9:00 am

‘There are a great many ways of holding on to our sanity amid the vices and follies of the world,’…

‘That little venal borough’: a poet’s jaundiced view of Aldeburgh

25 June 2022 9:00 am

‘To talk about Crabbe is to talk about England,’ E.M. Forster declared in a radio broadcast in May 1941, but…

Gay and abandoned: A Previous Life, by Edmund White, reviewed

22 January 2022 9:00 am

Edmund White’s new novel opens, somewhat improbably, in 2050. This imagined future, however, springs few surprises on the reader and…

Unlucky in love

8 January 2022 9:00 am

James Courage is one of those fine writers who, though he enjoyed considerable success in his lifetime, has now more…

How two literary magazines boosted morale during the Blitz

31 July 2021 9:00 am

William Loxley’s lively account of ‘Bloomsbury, the Blitz and Horizon magazine’ begins with W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood emigrating to…

All good friends and jolly good company: life with the Crichel Boys

27 February 2021 9:00 am

In the spring of 1945 three men pooled their resources in order to buy Long Crichel House, a former rectory…

Poise and wit: The Collected Stories of Shirley Hazzard reviewed

21 November 2020 9:00 am

Shirley Hazzard was in her late twenties when, in 1959, somewhat diffidently, she submitted her first short story to the…

The establishment was always covering up for Bob Boothby

30 May 2020 9:00 am

Just after John Pearson finished writing The Profession of Violence, his celebrated biography of the Krays, both his and his…

Without Joseph Banks, Cook’s first voyage might have been a failure

9 May 2020 9:00 am

When the wealthy young Joseph Banks announced that he intended joining Captain Cook’s expedition to Tahiti to observe the Transit…

Flower power: symbols of romance and revolution

2 May 2020 9:00 am

Critics have argued over the meaning of the great golden flower head to which Van Dyck points in his ‘Self-Portrait…

Capturing the mood of the English landscape: the genius of John Nash

23 November 2019 9:00 am

‘If I wanted to make a foreigner understand the mood of a typical English landscape,’ the art critic Eric Newton…

Was there some Freudian symbolism in Lucian’s botanical paintings?

7 September 2019 9:00 am

In early paintings such as ‘Man with a Thistle’ (1946), ‘Still-life with Green Lemon’ (1946) and ‘Self-portrait with Hyacinth Pot’…

Feasts, flowers and plein-air painting at Benton End

6 July 2019 9:00 am

Cedric Morris is often referred to as an artist-plantsman, and while as a breeder of plants, most particularly of irises,…

An illustration from Emperors, Admirals and Chimney Sweepers by Peter Marren

Fluttering to extinction: the tragedy of Britain’s butterflies

29 June 2019 9:00 am

In 1979, despite the best efforts of scientists for more than a century, a butterfly called the British Large Blue…

Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of Tysoe Saul Hancock, his wife Philadelphia (née Austen) and daughter Eliza (rumoured to have been the child of Warren Hastings) with their Indian maid Clarinda, c. 1764–5. Eliza was Jane Austen’s cousin and later sister-in-law, and is said to have inspired several of Austen’s characters, including the playful Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park

The scourge of Christian missionaries in British-Indian history

1 September 2018 9:00 am

Objectivity seems to be difficult for historians writing about Britain’s long and complicated relationship with India, and this makes the…

How pleasant to know Mr Lear

14 October 2017 9:00 am

Edward Lear liked to tell the story of how he was once sitting in a railway carriage with two women…

Harry Farr, a soldier with the 1st Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment, was executed for cowardice, aged 25, in 1916 when he refused to fight, despite almost certainly suffering from shell shock

The shocks and shells of the Somme

30 April 2016 9:00 am

In the final months of 1914, medical officers on the Western Front began seeing a new kind of casualty. Soldiers…

British troops go over the top on 1 July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme

The British army’s greatest catastrophe — and its most valuable lesson

5 September 2015 9:00 am

Peter Parker spends 24 hours on the bloodsoaked battlefield of the Somme, scene of the British army’s greatest catastrophe

RAMC stretcher-bearers from the South Eastern Mounted Brigade enter the Field Ambulance dressing station at Y Ravine. Picture courtesy of Stephen Chambers

The other trenches: the Dardanelles, 100 years on

4 April 2015 9:00 am

Peter Parker discerns classical allusion amid the horror in two books commemorating the centenary of the Gallipoli campaign

Princess Bamba, Catherine and Sophia Duleep Singh at their debut at Buckingham Palace, 1894

Sophia Duleep Singh: from socialite to socialist

24 January 2015 9:00 am

Princess Sophia Alexandrovna Duleep Singh (1876–1948) had a heritage as confusing as her name. Her father was a deposed Indian…

David Hockney, photographed by Christopher Simon Sykes

David Hockney, our most popular and hardworking living artist, returns to the easel

20 September 2014 9:00 am

The first volume of Christopher Simon Sykes’s biography of David Hockney ended in the summer of 1975. The 38-year-old painter…