Knowing what is going on between two people who are living together is fraught with difficulties per se and when the couple happen to be Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, a relationship that ended with her suicide, the problem of secure knowledge reaches an impasse. Sean Sheehan We […]
Book reviews
Vanessa Winship: photographing incertitude
For T.S. Eliot, winter is amnesic and deficient, “covering / Earth in forgetful snow, feeding / A little life with dried tubers”, but in Winship’s “Snow” it is a pregnant time, a waiting period, a meditative season; not the reawakening, the surfeit or the melancholy of a year’s other divisions. […]
The wasp in the fig
The fig is an inverted flower and needs to be pollinated to make the fruit. A certain kind of female fig wasp burrows into a male fig to lay eggs from which the hatchlings have incestuous sex. Sean Sheehan A resulting impregnated female wasp breaks out of the […]
Pathos and paganism at the National Theatre
Theatre is magic. One moment you’re walking across Waterloo Bridge to the National Theatre with vistas of modern architecture on either side and then, having found your seat for its production of Brian Friel’s “Dancing at Lughnasa”, an idyllic Irish scene places you in another dimension. Sean Sheehan […]
Vermeer: Gazing at the past
The current Vermeer exhibition in Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has long been completely sold out and were it to be extended for another four months it would probably sell out again. Sean Sheehan With no chance of seeing the largest collection of his paintings ever brought together in one […]