Pride of place above the fireplace in the sitting room of our little house in distant Blighty is a painting from North Bengal.
It was actually a bit of a relief to sit on the terrace of the Gezira Pension and have a quiet breakfast before plunging back once more into the traffic of Cairo in search of a carriage to the museum.
The audience for the jatra was all any Marxist theatre director in Kolkata could have wished for.
500 years ago, Edmund Spenser wrote a poem to celebrate a wedding taking place beside the River Thames. Each stanza ends with the refrain: “Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song”.
35000 spectators turned out amid the colourful shamianas and flags to watch the one (and only) unofficial Test in Dhaka in January, 1977.
The map is part of an exhibition arranged to mark the revival of the Cambridge Majlis, a society (dating from 1891) designed for students from all over the Subcontinent to meet socially to enjoy their commonalities and discuss and debate in a civil way their political differences.
By the time James Rennell in the 1770’s, working out of Dhaka, finished surveying all the many rivers of Bengal, most of them had changed course, thus showing as much indifference to cartography as to any other form of human presumption.
Did Shakespeare know he was “Shakespeare”? That is, even in his own day, did he know he was a cut above the ordinary when it came to writing dramatic poetry, that his language was, as a miner’s son would later put it, “so lovely! like the dyes from gas-tar”?
On March 18th, a poet named John was hit in the eye and knocked out by a ball while playing an informal game of cricket. Perhaps
It is a wonderful irony that T.S. Eliot, the publication of whose long poem The Waste Land a century ago is taken by the intelligentsia to
What's in a name? Suppose you are given the name of a well-known character in fiction, could this determine the sort of person you
Unnoticed I am going away/ Just as nobody saw me come./I clasp my hands and bow my head/As clouds puff up in the west…
Last weekend I went in search of my Nanna's bungalow. Seventy years ago, during World War II and in the years just after it, my mother and I had stayed with her mother in her bungalow in Erith, a small Thameside port, now part of Greater London.
“Would not the immolation of a daughter of India and a son of England awaken India to its continued state of subjugation and England to the iniquities of its proceedings?” - Bina Das (1932).
“This house,” said Mr Ranodhir Palchaudhuri, the owner of the colonnaded 19th century Neel Kuthi at Maheshgunj, “was built by a
These stories were told to John Drew by the Hungarian poets Ádám Nádasdy, translator of Shakespeare and Dante, and Győző Ferencz, Keeper of the Radnóti Archive.
