News & Notes

San Marco news, hot off the presses.

Knox Knox

Knox Knox

Many of you who do not have the good fortune to live in this happy land of Justice and Probity have been pressing Lucy on her opinion of the Amanda Knox trial. Well, as behoves a frequently distressed damsel with any sort of sisterly feeling, she has been firmly in...

Basingstoke and Reprints

Those of you who print out the biographical snippets Lucy lets fall in the hope of fleshing out (so to speak – not a spare pound on her) a 'nuanced' portrait will no doubt remember she had a little medical scare the summer before last after a jaunt in the Alcarrìa....

Poets on the Vaporetto

Filmgoers battling with steatopygous tourists on crowded Venetian public transport can be cheered by 'Poesie sul Vaporetto', a straight pinch from Judith Chernaik's 20-year-old London brilliant-wheeze 'Poems on the Underground'. The first batch of twenty included...

First Novel: Last 100 Days

PATRICK McGUINNESS has his first novel 'The Last 100 Days' (Seren) longlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize. Current Ladbrokes odds are 14/1 – on the generous side, says our man with his ear to the tannoy.

When a book is still a book

Now I have to say, to Lucy a book is a book, a convenient way of carrying words around, and not a fetish. But my brother Tom ('Hamish' to the family, for reasons lost in the Highland mists) has for many moons been what he is pleased to call an 'antiquarian...

Addio Celia Wembley

OBITUARY. So, Celia Wembley is with us no more. As it happens, I have some slight connection with CW, who came late to art, having been previously, well into her fifties, games mistress at my school (before my time of course). It came about in this wise. Our...

Michael Glover, Only So Much

MICHAEL GLOVER, responsible for both our first pamphlet, 'A Faint Dusting of Blue Hair', in far-off 2006, and our first book, 'For the Sheer Hell of Living' (2008) has just burst into song again, this time from a publishing imprint nearer home, Savage Poets...

Lucious Lucy

Couldn't have come at a worse time: beach weather pouring in with the prevailing wind, and Lucy's ballooned. In the normal way of things Chris (what with all that rowing to Trieste and back to work up an appetite for lunch) is lean, John F. – shall we say – less so,...

Saving the date(s)

Whichever day it was designated last week for the celebration of 150 years since The Unification, I've already forgotten, so damp a squib it sputtered. A few plasticky tricolori hanging limply from the odd balcony, northern separatists going about with long...

Here come the hominoids.

Here come the hominoids.

Now here's a funny thing. It seems to Lucy that in all her years in this glittery city she must always have been away at this season, visiting a rackety aunt in Kirkaldy or some such excursion. Because, although she lives quite near the Ghetto (no, she's not going to...