Clare Bucknell

‘Summer Night’ (1906-7)

Piet Mondrian​ liked to claim that his life had been a straight line. ‘I started off as a naturalist,’ he told a journalist who visited his studio in Paris in 1922. ‘I soon felt a need for a more severe reduction and limitation of my means, and gradually became more abstract.’ He had an album of reproductions of his work on hand...

Creative​ and destructive drives can be hard to tell apart. In Rochester’s ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’, a poem about premature ejaculation, the speaker blusters about his penis’s usual prowess:

Stiffly Resolv’d t’would Carelesly invadeWoman, nor Man, nor ought its fury stayd –Where ere it pierc’d a Cunt it found or made –

Making and wrecking,...

Novelists​ like to snoop inside their characters’ underwear drawers. In Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes (1926), Laura, the heroine, finds her sister-in-law Caroline difficult to read, except in one telling aspect:

Once only did she speak her spiritual mind to Laura. Laura was nursing her when she had influenza; Caroline wished to put on a clean nightdress, and Laura,...

Peggy Guggenheim​ had an ‘excessively unhappy’ childhood. ‘I have no pleasant memories of any kind,’ she wrote in her memoir, Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict (1946). She was biting about the glamorous townhouse on East 72nd St where she and her sisters, Benita and Hazel, grew up:

In the centre of this floor was a reception room with a huge tapestry of...

Tudor writers​ made being a court fool sound like a holiday. In John Heywood’s play Witty and Witless (c.1520s), ordinary working men are said to live with great ‘payne of body’: they strain their muscles ‘plowyng’, ‘cartyng’, ‘hedgyng and dychyng’, exposed all year round to the weather. ‘Some yn wynter fryse, some yn somer...