CHAPTER SIX
Make It New
Ezra Pound and the Lost Generation
London, 1908 — The American Arrives
In February 1908, a twenty-two-year-old from Idaho arrived in Europe with light luggage, a manuscript of poems that had been rejected...
CHAPTER FIVE
The Prophet
Kahlil Gibran
Bsharri
He was born on 6 January 1883, in the village of Bsharri, high in the mountains of what is now Lebanon — then part of the Ottoman Empire's Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate,...
CHAPTER FOUR
The Poet Who Learned to See
Rainer Maria Rilke
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that...
CHAPTER TWO
Flowers of Evil
Charles Baudelaire — The Poet Who Made Darkness Beautiful
Before the Beautiful Era
Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century was a medieval city undergoing violent modernisation. Its streets were narrow,...
RODIN And His Poets
CHAPTER ONE - The Man Who Made Stone Breathe
Auguste Rodin
Paris, 1840
He was born into a Paris that still smelled of coal smoke and river mud, in a city that had...
The View From Nowhere
A philosophical investigation into perception, thought, and being
The eye cannot see itself.
— Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 5.633
For Canard
I absolutely adore ducks; I’ve nibbled on their webs and sucked on their tongues in...
Lo Bak Go: The Golden Cake That Crossed the Sea
Chinese Fried Radish Cake (蘿蔔糕)
Few dishes tell a story quite as quietly, or as completely, as lo bak go. To look at it on the...
The Alchemy of Steam: The Story of Xiao Long Bao (小笼包)
You never forget your first taste of the little pleated dumpling filled with soup and pork, known as xiaolongbao. This is ostensibly because it...
