Current Issue: September - October 2025
PN Review 285

In this issue:

Marjorie Perloff - My 1950s
Horatio Morpurgo - Writings for Brear
Fawzia Muradali Kane - On John Boydell’s engraving of A View taken near Limehouse Bridge, looking down the Thames (1751)
Richard Price - The Accidental Curator
Sinéad Morrissey - God's Day
James Womack - Granada
Gregory Woods - on Hilary Holladay
Alexandra Reza - Césaire

Current Issue: September - October 2025
PN Review 285

My 1950s Marjorie Perloff My friend Anita Abbott and I, both in our early nineties, were reminiscing about the Old Days. ‘The fifties,’ she suddenly said with total conviction, ‘was the best decade of my life.’ I was startled. ‘What about the treatment of Blacks’, I asked. Or of gays, the fifties being, as I recall it, a horribly homophobic decade, when those even faintly suspect of being gay couldn’t get job clearances. ‘But most people were much happier then’, she insisted. ‘And we had so much fun.’ Perhaps hers was just a reaction to having been young and hence happier in her twenties. But I must confess I feel the same way. For me, the 1950s was somehow a golden age. Why? In The Vienna Paradox (2004), I wrote about my childhood years, first in Vienna and then as a refugee from Hitler in the......
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Current Issue: September - October 2025
PN Review 285

Writings for Brear Horatio Morpurgo The children, asleep in the back after a 4 am start, aren’t missing much. Dawn is cloud-cover filling slowly and greyly with light. Driving west across Cornwall, the A30 grows each year a little straighter here, wider there. The ferry this time batters and bludgeons its way through a heavier sea than normal. Passengers bend double, recklessly, voluptuously abandon themselves to being ill. I disappear into my binoculars, see no dolphins, am stoical. Waves foam and pitch, cross-hatched with the annual flickering of shearwaters. Every August we do some (generally more pleasurable) version of this. The ship between Penzance and the Isles of Scilly is still the same one I first boarded about the age my son is now. I liked one island straight away. To describe Bryher as England’s westernmost settlement makes it sound too bleak. Tresco, to its......
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Current Issue: September - October 2025
PN Review 285

On John Boydell’s engraving of A View taken near Limehouse Bridge, looking down the Thames (1751) Fawzia Muradali Kane We know this view. It is familiar, and its unchanging parts have become anchors for our mind’s home. The river flows. The sky stretches over. The shingle and sand scrape along the foreshore. These have been so before us, over the centuries – millennia even – and will persist beyond our days. How many times have we seen such skies over us in this place? The light wind prevails from the southwest (clue: the ship’s pennants), across the river’s curve from Pageant Stairs, billowing and sweeping the clouds over the north bank’s rooftops. From the shadows and lightness of the sky above the larger ship to the right, we notice the sun is shining from the southeast. The angles of drawn rays and cast shadows tell us it is around mid-morning. Light clothing......
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