Essays | Ruth Padel
ON BRUEGEL’S ‘LANDSCAPE WITH FLIGHT INTO EGYPT
This is a talk Ruth gave at the Courtauld Gallery in September 2009. Listen to the talk online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/audioslideshow/2010/nov/09/ruth-padel-bruegel-courtauld See the painting: http://www.artandarchitecture.org.uk/images/gallery/6b06f360.htm This is the text of her talk ***** “Landscape with?” What are we supposed to be looking at, the story or its setting? This landscape is a dialogue between blue-green and(read more…)
THE NAME AND NATURE OF POETRY
THE NAME AND NATURE OF POETRY The Housman Lecture, delivered at the Hay Festival 1st June 2011 At the beginning of Tom Stoppard’s play The Invention of Love, A.E. Housman has just died. His shade asks Charon why they are hanging round on the bank of the Styx. “Are we waiting for someone?”(read more…)
Personally Speaking – on Life, Poems and Tigers
Pulished in Sunday Telegraph Magazine, Seven November 12th 2006 I was born in an attic. My first memory is being held up to look out of its window at a wild creature, which was looking back at me. An owl, roosting in a chimney-top abovce the mews. Only after I’d written ten books did I(read more…)
On Putting Your Dog to Sleep
Independent,, December 1999 I’ve just killed my best friend. She was lying on a sheepskin at the Portman Vetinerary Clinic. No one, to her relief, examining her; the people she loved most around her. My daughter’s spaniel was trying, as usual, to grab food. Jenny’s head was in my hand; her difficult hind legs tucked(read more…)
White Stallions: The Harmony and Sexuality of The Horse
The Independent, 1997 They are the animals of luck and dream. From mares in the night to white waves thundering off into every horizon, horses stand for imagination and freedom. One friend of mine used to gaze at the light-bulb till the filament burned a lucky horse-shoe into her brain; my daughter lists dreamily all(read more…)
Britain’s Wild Ponies
Independent Magazine, February 2001 At last year’s Labour Conference, John Prescott said he would give the New Forest to the Nation as a National Park. When I went down there in the autumn, through rainy yellow leaves and deep mud to a remote pony round-up – called, in Forest terminology, a pony drift – I(read more…)
Sacred, Hypocritical – and Armour-Plated? Crocodiles and Alligators
The Times, July 2002 You must never smile at a crocodile, however seductively he leers. “Come hither, little one”, whispers the crocodile on the banks of the Limpopo River at the inquisitive, gullible Elephant’s Child in Kipling’s Just So Stories. Nineteenth-century European images of crocodiles, normally Nil-dwellers, picked on this hypocrisy. How cheerfully he seems(read more…)
The Bloodflow Does Not Stop: Leeches and Healing
The Times, September 2002 You think of a leech with disgust: a bloodsucker, a parasite. Forties thrillers describe human blackmailers as “leeches”. Someone you can’t shake off at a party sticks to you “like a leech.” But the astonishing thing about the word is that it first meant “healer”, and was later applied to bloodsucking(read more…)
Sacred Poison: Vipers and Adders
Published in The Times May 2002 Poison: cold, coiled and lurking. An enamelled skin, sloughed off annually. A flickering, forked tongue and eyes that never blink. All this makes “viper” a byword for treachery, for prettily camouflaged wickedness, a lethal danger you never see. “If a snake or a viper cross your path, watch out(read more…)
Hare Hunted, Hare Magic, Hare Tamed
The Times, October 2002 Timid as a hare, we say. He ran like a hare. “Started hares” is raising a lot of irrelevant side-issues. Hare-brained is scatty, erratic: a mind skittering about in all directions. Running very fast (as in the fable of the hare and the tortoise), and being afraid: these are what a(read more…)
