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Cluster index: Igor Webb

Never again.

By Igor Webb.   ounted on the wall next to my desk is a large (24″ x 18″) formal black-and-white photo of me in a gilded frame, aged maybe three. When the news of the Hamas invasion of Israel, and of the Israeli response, first broke, it was this old photo that immediately came to […]

At Risk of Interment.

W.G. Sebald in Terezin and Breendonk.     By Will Stone. I don’t think you can focus on the horror of the Holocaust. It’s like the head of the Medusa. You carry it with you in a sack, but if you looked at it, you’d be petrified. —W.G. Sebald     Preface he two locations […]

Fundamental Things.

Igor Webb: ‘And this was the food we baked in these dishes and put on these plates. The plates are all blue…’

Matthias’ Laments.

Igor Webb: ‘It’s in “Some of Her Things,” a fable in the form of a long prose poem, written shortly after Diana’s death, that Matthias’ most powerfully, and poignantly, deploys his language and his craft. To borrow Michael Hofman’s word, it is a courtly threnody for lost time.’

On Longinus and bread.

Igor Webb: ‘I was twenty-five, for example, when I pulled William Hazlitt’s Political Essays (1819) off the shelf in the English library, upstairs in the elegant main building, the Wilkins Building, at University College, London, where I had the good fortune to have been sent for the year by Stanford on a Leverhulme Fellowship (the year was 1966!). But when I opened the volume, I discovered—as I would discover about many books in that library—that the pages were uncut.’