Essays & Features

I chose William Cowper as ‘My Hero’ in the Guardian, 2 February 2013.

In my view we should hear a lot more about this great poet of nature, faith, and homeliness. It’s well worth a visit to his house at Olney, where you can see Cowper’s summerhouse and stockings as well as the fabled sofa that prompted his poem The Task.

Toller Fratrum by Judith Stainton (Little Toller Books, 2012) tells the history of a Dorset parish which was once home to the Knights Templar. Beautifully produced by Little Toller Books (a small publishing house which has done much to revive interest in the classics of nature-writing and local history), the book includes photographs of the mesmerising Norman carvings in the church of St Basil.

Jonathan Newdick’s Out of Time? is the culmination of a project in which Newdick studied the barns, stables and outhouses to be found within a few miles of his home in Petworth, Sussex. The book reproduces his exquisitely crafted, stylish and sometimes witty drawings of these forgotten buildings in their landscapes, and includes Newdick’s reflections on the past and future of rural places. I wrote a foreword.

Introduction to Poster King: Edward McKnight Kauffer, accompanying an exhibition at the Estorick Collection in London, 2011.

“…There is something in Kauffer’s love of Burton which links with his love of gadgets in his studio and paintbrushes stored ritually in descending order of size. He found magic in this pedantry, and he turned his own need for precision into an exploration of man’s quest for order. The poet Marianne Moore, who was a close friend of Kauffer in his later years, summed all this up with a phrase characteristic of her own imaginative exactitude: ‘Edward McKnight Kauffer’, she said in 1949, ‘is a parable of uncompromise’.”

‘The Road South’, in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition John Piper in Kent and Sussex, Mascalls Gallery March 2011.

In Graham Sutherland: An Unfinished World, 2011, published in conjunction with an exhibition at Modern Art Oxford curated by Turner-shortlisted artist George Shaw.