Return of a Native

There were few people in the brasserie [Lipp] and when I sat down on the bench against the wall with the mirror in back and a table in front and the waiter asked if I wanted a beer I asked for a distingue, the big glass mug that held a liter, and for a po…

Against all odds, Samuel Johnson, a poor boy from provincial England who was beset by involuntary tics and melancholia, became a literary giant of 18th century London.

Vincent van Gogh headed for the South of France from Paris in February 1888 to seek a different, brighter light that he hoped would release the flat, clear colours he so admired in the Japanese ukiyo-e prints he had seen in Paris.

To thirteen year old Virginia Woolf, the untimely death of her mother, Julia Stephen, at the age of forty-nine seemed to be ‘the greatest disaster that could happen.’

‘Why am I so incredibly and incurably romantic about Cornwall?’

On St Valentine’s Day, 1900, a party of teachers and schoolgirls from a prestigious boarding school escape their usual suffocating routine with a late summer picnic at Hanging Rock, a former volcano 70 kilometres north of Melbourne.

Bachelor poet Philip Larkin, known as the ‘Hermit of Hull’, took pains to present himself as an unassuming man, with little appetite for the trappings of a public literary life.

From 1957 to 1963 in one of the cheapest and filthiest hotels in Paris, key members of the Beats: Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Brion Gysin reached creative heights with their verbal, sonic and visual experiments, and produced some…

E.F.

The Water-Babies was written in 1862 by one of the strangest and most beloved men of his age.

A love of nature and freedom motivated writer and artist Hope Bourne to carve out a challenging yet simple, and self-sufficient life in the heart of one of Britain’s wildest landscapes.

The writer and philosopher Iris Murdoch was difficult to resist.

I was prompted to write this story in response to the recent death of Mr Nicolas Fotiou, a Greek immigrant and deeply enigmatic man who owned and ran the Olympia Milk Bar in Sydney’s Stanmore for nearly six decades.

In 1883 during the construction of Thomas Hardy’s house, Max Gate, excavations for a well uncovered three graves.

It was London in the 1970’s and unaware that his life was about to change its course completely, David Esterly, an American Fulbright scholar who had just completed a PhD from Cambridge University, was out walking with his fiancée, Marietta von Bernuth.