Articles by: Gerry Simpson

A first 'Letter from London'. Three years ago I drove through England, from London to Scotland, and was surprised to see so many English flags either flying from cars and windows or on flagpoles planted defiantly in front gardens. I live in Remain London and holiday in Remain Scotland, so it is rare for me to come across these symbols of a Brexitish English nationalism. Such flag-waving, largely unseen outside English football stadiums, seemed to…

A short history of incomprehensible wars. Surrounded by a little semi-circle of auditors on the Thames, Marlow, the narrator in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, recounts a scene he had witnessed during his time working on another river, the Congo. A French frigate, he remembers, had been 'firing incomprehensibly into the continent'. The reader might understand this to mean that Marlow cannot fully understand why the French vessel would fire shells randomly into the jungle.…

Barry Hill has written a maverick, daring, vulnerable and vigilant book for our times. This is a work that conveys a sense of place but also placelessness - situated fully within India and then Japan but also always in transition between the two and in conversation with an Australia represented in part by a departed father and his departed ideals. In some respects it is a simple thing to review a book like this. Irresistibly…