Hi. Just wanted to share an update about Proust FM.

Firstly, the site has been shortlisted for a Lovie Award, the European offshoot of the Webby Awards.

“The Lovie Awards is the Webby Awards' benchmark for European digital excellence, recognising the people, projects, and ideas shaping Europe's contributions to the internet.”

I’m really pleased to see the project acknowledged in this way. Alongside the judging, there’s a People’s Award. Voting closes tonight (15 Oct) at 23:59 – I’d be super grateful if you wanted to vote and support the site.

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And also some feature improvements to announce:

• All of The Guermantes Way is now online, as well as the first four sections of Cities of the Plain – which means we now have approx. half the novel now live

• You can now scrub forwards and backwards in the audio timeline and also skip either way by 30 seconds

• You can then rejoin the live stream, with a ‘Back to Live’ option

• You can also now share a direct link to any moment in the audio stream

• Have also added a handy ISOLT resource page, which I’ll continue to improve, plus individual volume pages

Finally, in other Proust news, do check out the latest post from the brilliant , who’ll be starting a read along of In Search of Lost Time in 2027, which is also the 100-year anniversary of the publication of the final volume, Time Regained. It’s a great opportunity to check out the new Oxford World Classics editions, which are currently mid-publication.

Read the Classics with Henry Eliot

Marcel Proust

Dear Proustians…

Read more

15 days ago · 22 likes · 3 comments · Henry Eliot

Thanks to everyone that has been using and supporting the site. I’ve had some lovely comments and feedback.

À bientôt!

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Welcome to the latest instalment of my journey through Sight & Sound’s Greatest 100 films of all time. You can read the rest of the series published so far here.

[Contains spoilers]

Is it possible for a film to be somehow both better and worse than you remember? That’s how I felt about Parasite (2019) following a recent rewatch. As technical filmmaking goes it’s stunning, composed with a precise, painterly eye, and full of great stuff. Great performances. Great production design. Great script. But it was neither as funny nor as horrific as I once thought. What had seemed, in 2019, like a giddy genre-defying marvel now plays as something more… well … obvious.

The hard-up Kims scheme their way into the household of the affluent Parks, each in turn – as English tutor, art therapist, driver, and housekeeper – until they’ve occupied the entire domestic sphere. It’s beautifully done. Full of wit and intrigue. Then we find someone else hidden in the basement and the whole thing tips into Abraham and Török territory. From the outside, the Park house is all modernist lines and manicured lawns. But concealed within is a crypt that reeks of rot and trauma.

None of this is exactly subtle. Bong’s intention is to keep us guessing who the parasite is meant to be. The Kims, on the make, hollowing out the Parks from within? The Parks themselves, whose wealth depends entirely on the labour of people they barely notice? Or the forgotten man below, feeding off the scraps of those above? Part of the film’s elegance is in refusing to settle the question, because the answer is most likely a matter of base and superstructure, hinting at something far more difficult to parse: a parasitical Ouroboros.

We’re all eating each other. It’s just the scale that’s off. Some get a bigger helping. That’s how the game works – an elaborate set of rules through which value is extracted from the masses and accumulated by the few. Wages stagnate, asset prices balloon. The wealthy live in glass houses on hills; the rest subsist below ground. Bong doesn’t overly editorialise. He just shows us the architecture, top to bottom, and lets us draw the obvious conclusion. Late-stage capitalism sucks.

Given the state of the world these days, the trouble is that what once felt like biting satire now feels more like reportage. The Grand-Guignol denouement comes as something of a relief. But what sticks isn’t the rush of violence. It’s Ki-woo’s final fantasy of buying the house himself and liberating his father, now hiding in the crypt below. It’s a beautiful conceit, but cruel – predicated on the illusory promise that he’ll one day cross the threshold from the many to the few. But what difference would that really make? Meet the new parasite, same as the old parasite.

So perhaps it isn’t a film that reveals anything surprising anymore. It just looks at the whole horror show with that painterly eye and asks us to look too. Whether the looking changes anything is another question entirely. The host persists. The parasite persists. Two sides of the same insidious coin. Meanwhile, the porch light flickers, as down in the basement an invisible man taps out messages no one wants to hear.

See here for the full list of Sight & Sound’s Greatest 100 films of all time

Just like that a pub captures your heart, sets up camp, and remains forever. It happens something like this. Head to Margate for a day of seaside shenanigans; perhaps four good souls, with beers for the train. Throw in some covert romantic intrigue. Eat fish, chips, ice cream; wander across the Sands; connect nothing with nothing. Lose yourself beneath one of those sublime Turner sunsets, then head Fez-wards and lose yourself all over again, for the rest of time, throbbing between two lives – the one that’s yours and the one you left here, adrift in some kind of lunatic heaven.

This is part of the 100 Word Pubs series, which you can view here

So many lists. So little time. It got me thinking. Not what I believe the greatest books to be, but what books I couldn’t imagine living without.

I mean the books that have made my life intellectually, emotionally, or spiritually better. The books that have made me see, or think about, the world differently.

So here they are, in the order I first read them:

1. The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy – Douglas Adams

This brilliant book filled me with joy as a child. It showed me that reading needn’t be a chore, but could be a blessing. Perhaps more than any other, it was the book that taught me to love to read. But behind the laughs, there were big ideas in there too. Ideas about the nature of the universe and how impossibly strange and magnificent it is. And ideas about humanity and how impossibly strange and silly we all are. If that wasn’t enough, it also preached grace under pressure (Don’t Panic) and the wisdom of never getting caught without a towel.

2. Catch-22 – Jospeh Heller

My father told me this story. When he was a boy he saw his own father reading a book and howling with laughter. The book was then given to his elder brother, who had the same response. Finally, it was handed down to him. And he found out what they were howling at, as he howled himself. The book was Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. One day, many years later, I read it and discovered what it was that made them laugh so much. The absurd things men do to each other and the absurd fictions they concoct to justify it. I howled and howled and after I’d stopped howling, I too knew the truth.

3. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

I struggle to think of a novel as perfectly written as this one. If there’s a word out of place, please show it to me. For that reason, it offers a masterclass for anyone with an interest in writing. But beyond simple best practice, there’s a deep and difficult lesson in there about the nature of desire – about the way we so often conspire to dream of a future that’s – somehow – already past. I was still stuffed with doubts during my first year at university. Was literature really the right course for me? When I first read this, a few weeks in, I knew I’d made the right decision.

4. To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf

For a young reader taking a first dip into the vast sea of literature, this book lights the way, offering nothing short of a new way to read – one that takes you inside the minds of its characters to reveal the byzantine flow of their thoughts. At age 18, I didn’t know such a thing was possible. It was a startling experience that broke open a hidden world of interiority and emotional drama that, once experienced, was impossible to forget. After this, I read all of Woolf’s novels as quickly as I could. She’s ubiquitous now – maybe even overexposed – and often the object of a kind of sneering criticism, as if she’s not really that good. Which is about as wrongheaded as it gets. She is that good. Plain and simple.

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5. Moby Dick – Herman Melville

I remember one rather smart cookie in my American Lit class who proclaimed boldly one day: “Moby Dick is a modernist novel.” And we all sat there in a kind of mute awe, thinking how clever he was, and wishing we’d had the chops to say something like that. Was he right? Kind of. Does is matter? Not really. Whether you read it as a proto-modernist classic, a maritime romp, a metaphysical treatise, or a metaphor for America itself, Melville’s briny tome lays bare our capacity for self-delusion and destruction like few other books do – which makes it an essential text for helping us grapple with the dark depths of the human soul. Especially useful these days.

6. The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann

This book was a gift from a girlfriend. By the time I’d finished reading it, we’d split up. Hence, its association – for me – with unrequited love and a kind of ironic fatalism. I read it through a phase of romantic trauma. I became lost, like Hans Castorp in a snowstorm. Time was what I needed and luckily all I had. Time and a kind of reluctant isolation. And that’s exactly what this book demands. Only then, does it confer its mysterious wisdom, which is to be alive to what politics means with respect to personal truth, and what personal truth means with respect to politics. That’s especially important today, when those same dark forces that Mann’s novel describes are on the march, and the same tepid liberalism that failed to stop them back then, is offering much the same by way of response.

7. In Search Of Lost Time – Marcel Proust

Of all the books I’ve ever read, this is the greatest. Easy. It’s not even close. You begin reading about the Narrator/Proust figure, you end up reading about yourself. We are all that small child in bed cleaving to its mother. We are all driven into the past by the thought of the future, and into the future by the thought of the past. We are all vain and regretful. We are all made of memory, mishap and misjudged passion. We are all at the mercy of merciless time. And we must all bite the bullet of transformation, which is what this sublime book represents: the transformation of time, of trauma, of every petty deed and unkempt thought, and every wasted moment we’ve ever spent – through the power of percipience, craft, and sheer determination – into art.

More on Proust here

8. Love’s Work – Gillian Rose

It’s not a novel, but it easily has the depth of one. Part memoir, part philosophical tract, this short book is full of a kind of deep and sympathetic wisdom that reveals itself differently at different times in your life, making it ripe for dipping into or re-reading in full, for carrying regularly in your pocket and forever in your heart. I hadn’t quite come to terms with what love meant, what it didn’t mean, and what it might be in the right circumstances. This book set me on the right course.

More on Love’s Work here

9. Dreamtime – John Moriarty

This book presupposes a lot of reading, especially of religious and mythic texts, but it’s worthwhile. In many ways it’s a portal to those earlier narratives, fusing them into a pantheistic personal vision that transcends our narrow anthropocentrism and reaches for something far greater. With that alone, it has taught me so much about human history and its mythic superstructure, and about how that connects with Nature. A friend gave this to me shortly before he died. It’s a book about death and about what lies beyond. He’d somehow learnt its lessons. I only hope that I can too.

More on Dreamtime here

I’d love to know what are the books that you can’t live without and why. Please leave a comment below.

I’m delighted to share a new digital Proust-inspired project I’ve been working on. It’s called Marcel Proust’s 50 Favourite Books.

There’s been a lot of ‘best book’ lists lately, and a lot of talk about ‘the greatest novels of all time’ etc., especially after the recent Guardian top 100, which certainly provoked a lot of debate here on Substack.

I’m not the biggest fan of these things, but it did set me thinking. How might a list function as something a bit more useful, a research tool say, or a way to discover more about your favourite author? Once again, Proust showed me the way.

As well as being a great writer, Proust was also a great reader. And the authors he read throughout his life became a clear influence on his work. And not just in a behind-the-scenes kind of way. From Balzac to Madame de Sévigné, Thomas Hardy to George Eliot, Dostoyevsky to Dickens, many of them turn up – specifically referenced by the Narrator – in À la recherche du temps perdu.

So, I’ve spent the last few weeks researching and building an online resource for people to use – a list comprising 50 of the key works that influenced Proust, with a summary of each, and some suggestions for further reading below. Plus you can keep track of how many you’ve read too!

Visit Marcel Proust's 50 Favourite Books

I really hope you enjoy it. And if you do, please consider becoming a paid subscriber here. Most of what I do is free, but I do have hosting costs for this and Proust FM, so even £4 per month really helps. You’ll also get access to every chapter of my own book about reading Proust, Oh That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrw.

“In my intentionally naked room there is only one reproduction of a work of art: an excellent photograph of Whistler’s ‘Carlyle’ in a serpentine overcoat like the dress in his portrait of his mother.”

– Marcel Proust

It’s no secret that Proust is what we might call a ‘painterly writer’. As a teenager, he would wander the halls of the Louvre absorbing what he discovered there. This first-hand experience was supplemented by the boom in reproductions, which made the history of Western art available to the everyday reader. Much of what he loved found its way into his great novel, In Search of Lost Time, which is a book full of references to art and artists. Three painters are mentioned more than any other. The first is Vermeer. The second is Rembrandt. The third is James McNeill Whistler.

With Tate Britain’s exhibition on Whistler having recently opened in London, it seemed the ideal time to explore the connections between these two great artists.

Whistler’s Carlyle

Here it is. The only picture Proust had on his wall, according to a letter written in 1905 to his friend, Marie Nordlinger. Thus, the room in question must have been at 45 rue de Courcelles, which was where he lived with his parents during their final years. His father died in 1903; his mother in 1905. Proust stayed for a while, but eventually found the memories too painful and left for an apartment on Boulevard Haussmann, which was where he wrote the majority of The Search.

Three years later, he sent another friend, Reynaldo Hahn, a playful sketch in his own hand of the same picture, labelled ‘Karlilch Par Wisthlerch’. But we know Proust was aware of Whistler from at least as early as 1891, when he was just 19 years old. Articles written by him in the magazine Le Mensuel reference the artist. Proust and Nordlinger shared their mutual appreciation of the American when they first met in 1896, and she later sent him (in English) a copy of Whistler’s famous Ten O’Clock lecture, in which he set out his aesthetic credo – art for art’s sake – in full.

The meeting

In 1897, the two men met for the only time. This was at the salon of Méry Laurent, a Parisian socialite known for her affair with Manet, and one of the possible models for Proust’s character, Odette de Crécy. By all accounts the meeting went well. Proust was green, Whistler grey. The eager younger man was keen to discuss the artist’s sworn enemy (and Proust’s great influence), the English polymath and critic John Ruskin, whom Whistler declared “knew absolutely nothing about pictures”. For Proust, the two men represented opposing ideas about art, which were in certain respects synthesised into his own evolving theory. “The more I think of the theories of Ruskin and Whistler the more I believe they are not irreconcilable,” he wrote to Nordlinger. That night, Whistler left behind a pair of gloves, which Proust took home as a keepsake and then later misplaced himself.

Whistler vs. Ruskin

Interesting, that Proust was so drawn to these two giants of Anglo-American culture. Much has been written about the 1878 court case which pitched them against one another, and I draw your attention to this piece by if you’d like to find out more. But the short story is that Ruskin slagged off a painting by Whistler, and Whistler sued him for libel. Looking over his account of the trial, one is struck by the jocular tone of the proceedings, with Whistler offering a barrage of witty retorts and epigrams during his cross-examination, as the barristers enquired into the precise nature (and value) of his art. Here’s the painting that caused all the fuss:

Buried in the broadsides was the idea that Whistler’s paintings had something ‘unfinished’ about them, certainly according to the ‘expert witnesses’ called by Ruskin’s legal team, among them the Pre-Raphaelite inspired artist, Edward Burne-Jones. Through today’s eyes, this unfinishedness is perhaps what lends Whistler’s art its ‘modernity’. It doesn’t attempt to capture a fixed reality, but show somehow that the world – and meaning along with it – is always fluid, always in motion. It’s this quality that Proust was most drawn to, just as he was equally drawn to Ruskin’s moral faith and meticulous eye, until such time as he decided that the latter was guilty of aesthetic idolatry, and Whistler’s less sententious view prevailed.

What is ‘painterly writing’?

To Proust then, Whistler was clearly a transitional figure. One who helped him transit certain ideas about art from the old to the new. For Proust, art’s power dwelt in its capacity to transform experience. Ruskin remained too tied to art’s materiality, to its ethical imperatives, whereas Proust’s morality was never didactic, and certainly never dogmatic. It was drawn from a metaphysical source, from a feeling that nothing is ever what it seems and thus, that doubt itself might, in some way, function as a moral spur.

You might say that art, in Proust’s eyes, represented a way to reach a reality un-blighted by habit, to prize open the numinous poetry of Nature, Being, and the mysterious interrelation between them. His technique was thus analogous to Whistler’s – with an emphasis on a certain visual instability, a shifting and somewhat amorphous rendering of the world through the use of metaphor, multiple perspectives, densely layered description, intentional discursiveness, and a kind of notional ekphrasis. This is ‘painterly writing’ and it finds its fictive embodiment in the character of Elstir.

Elstir

The Search famously features a trio of artists who function as a way to articulate Proust’s ideas about the nature of art. Bergotte, the writer. Vinteuil, the composer. And Elstir, the painter. All are composites (as are most of his characters), and Elstir is typically regarded as a mix of Monet, Helleu, Moreau… and Whistler. Hence the almost anagrammatic name.

It’s noteworthy that early in the novel (and far earlier in the narrative) Elstir’s art is first described through the eyes of the conservative M. and Mme Cottard, as if “the painter simply flung colours at random on his canvases”. Proust is lampooning the couple’s lack of imagination. Of course, the remark is not dissimilar to Ruskin’s own description of Whistler “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face”.

Back then, Elstir went by the sobriquet ‘M. Biche’ and was a member of the snobbish Verdurin clique. Often the name is dropped entirely and he is referred to as simply “the painter” or “the painter who was then in favour”. It’s at the Verdurin’s salon that he first meets Charles Swann, who at this time is madly in love with the famed courtesan, Odette de Crécy. It is implied that Odette and Biche/Elstir were once lovers.

When we meet him much later, in the second volume, he is an older man and a famous artist. Proust’s narrator describes him as having “a profound influence on my way of seeing things”. Invited to Elstir’s studio – which “appeared to me like the laboratory of a sort of new creation of the world” – he discovers the artist’s seascapes, in which the boundary between land and sea and sky is almost indistinguishable.

“Naturally enough, what he had in his studio were almost all seascapes done here at Balbec. But I was able to discern from these that the charm of each of them lay in a sort of metamorphosis of the objects represented, analogous to what in poetry we call metaphor, and that, if God the Father had created things by naming them, it was by taking away their names or giving them other names that Elstir had created them anew.”

Elstir – much like Whistler – trades in the visual equivalent of semantic substitution, which for Proust carried a greater ‘truth’ because it captured the protean, perspectival nature of perception, and formed the basis of his epistemology. Thus, churches are rendered as marine phenomena, ranks of sailing boats as urban infrastructure. The sea becomes the land, the land becomes the sea. Even in the here and now, things are never quite what they seem, let alone when time and memory intercede.

Miss Sacripant

This brings us to another painting in Elstir’s studio, this time of a young, coquettish woman, titled Miss Sacripant, October 1872. The narrator is struck by this portrait from the age just before he was born, which Elstir quickly hides away when his wife enters the room. It’s only later that the narrator inadvertently stumbles upon who the subject is: Odette, now Mme Swann, the mother of his own first crush, Gilberte.

“And this, Elstir’s earliest manner, was the most devastating of birth certificates for Odette because it not only established her, as did her photographs of the same period, as the younger sister of various well-known courtesans, but made her portrait contemporary with the countless portraits that Manet or Whistler had painted of all those vanished models, models who already belonged to oblivion or to history.”

For the narrator, this realisation soon prompts a second. If he had painted this, could it be that the great Elstir and the gauche M. Biche, ‘the painter then in favour’, are one and the same person? Indeed they are – yet further proof of the difference between what we think we see and what is really there, which is the territory, and tension, that Proust’s great novel explores time and time again.

“There is no man,” Elstir says, “however wise, who has not at some period in his youth, said things or lived in a way the consciousness of which is so unpleasant to him in later life that he would gladly, if he could, expunge it from his memory. And yet he ought not entirely to regret it, because he cannot be certain that he has indeed become a wise man – so far as it is possible for any of us to be wise – unless he has passed through all the fatuous or unwholesome incarnations by which that ultimate stage must be preceded.”

In this way, Proust often revealed his characters in reverse, which is something he learnt in part from Dostoyevsky. And he has Elstir paint in a similar fashion, which is something he learnt in part from Whistler. Late in the novel, he knowingly inserts this method into the voice of the narrator, who while talking to Gilberte about the inscrutability of war, says: “… it would be right to paint it as Elstir painted the sea, by reversing the real and the apparent, starting from illusions and beliefs which one then slowly brings into line with the truth, which is the manner in which Dostoyevsky tells the story of a life.”

It’s also worth noting that it is Elstir who introduces the Narrator to Albertine, which drives much of the second half of the novel. She too is a character told backwards, or more properly, a character endlessly deferred, whose true nature is always in question, seen through the haze of the narrator’s perception, prejudice and suffering.

Mothers

It only struck me as I was writing this that both Whistler and Proust are known for presenting enduring portraits of their mothers. Coincidence? Probably. Whistler’s mother was by all accounts a stabilising force on her son, who was known for his flamboyant, bohemian lifestyle. The portrait of her, which for him was an exercise in artistic composition, became for the rest of the world an icon of motherhood. A meme.

Meanwhile, Proust’s mother was one of the great catalysts for his literary endeavours. She helped him with his translations of Ruskin and inhabited the emotional, intellectual, and moral centre of his life and work. Along with the madeleine, the ‘bedtime kiss’ is a key part of the early narrative of The Search. It’s what many readers remember and recognise – that profound craving for the love and attention of the person who brought us into the world.

A final word

Proust on Whistler: “If the man who painted those Venices in turquoise, those Amsterdams in topaz, those Brittanies in opal, if the portraitist of Miss Alexander, the painter of the room with the rose-strewn curtains and above all of the sails at night… is not a great painter, one can only think there never was one.”

James McNeill Whistler is on at Tate Britain in London until 27 September 2026

Firstly, forgive me for rehashing this format, but I couldn’t help it.

Most of the internet still sucks, of course. But there are some bright corners of humanity still out there to console us.

Also, after posting the original Nine websites that prove the Internet isn’t totally awful, I received lots of great recommendations for other sites (and had a few more up my sleeve), so I just had to share them with you.

Once again, in no particular order:

1. The Complete Review

Wonderfully retro literary site run by the mysterious M.A. Orthofer that’s been going since 1999. Seriously, how does he do it? An abundance of reviews surveying book releases over the last quarter of a century (more than 5,400 and counting, so that’s around 200 a year), plus aggregated reviews from across the internet. A rabbit hole for bibliophiles. Big thanks to for this one.

2. Current Rothko

Almost as genius as the man himself. A website that matches the weather where you are to a suitable painting by Rothko. Pure perfection.

3. Radio Garden

Another excellent radio platform. Listen to thousands of stations from around the world. The globe interface is genius. Reassuringly cacophonous. Thanks to for recommending this.

4. 50 Watts

An archive of weird and wonderful visual ephemera from around the world. Book covers, illustrations, graphic novels, movie posters. From The Rabbit Dreams of Dr. Freud's Niece to Carlo Farneti's 1935 illustrations Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal. Properly brilliant. Thanks to for this one.

5. Standard Ebooks

A very well put together, free ebooks site. There’s some great stuff here. Old-time adventure yarns from the likes of Verne, Buchan, Burroughs. Excellent auto/biography, including the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and The Education of Henry Adams. Most of Shakespeare. The Greeks. And some banging classics from the likes of Dickens, Wilde, Chekhov and, of course, Proust.

6. Radio Aporee

A cornucopia of field recordings, uploaded by practitioners across the globe. There’s something wonderfully comforting about dipping into another time/place like this. That tree falling in the woods. It did make a sound. Probably. Thanks to for suggesting this one. Do also check out their radio.earth.

7. The Public Domain Review

Another brilliantly curated online collection that digs through all the weird and wonderful stuff that’s fallen out of copyright: old books, illustrations, films. A digital Wunderkammer. Plus, essays by writers and historians on outré topics – the early history of microphotography, body snatching in Victorian Britain, medieval people who believed they were made of glass. That kind of thing. Awesome.

8. Map Of Metal

Do you come from the land of the ice and snow, from the midnight sun where the hot springs flow? Then you’ll probably need this. Melodic Power Metal. Traditional Doom Metal. Tech Death. Blackened Crust. It’s all here. Handily laid out in cartographic form for experienced travellers and novices alike. Abandon all hope, ye who enter. Thanks to for this one.

9. Every Noise At Once

This is so good. Built by former Spotify data alchemist Glenn McDonald, a clickable scatter-plot of more than 6,000 music genres. Want to know what Chilean techno sounds like? Or Russian viral pop? Or South Borneo indie? Or Ugandan gospel? It’s all here, and so much more. Thanks to for pointing me in the general direction of this one.

And here’s the original article, in case you missed it:

If you have a site to recommend, please just leave a comment below.

I just wanted to share this new mini-documentary about the Spanish artist Francisco de Zurbarán, which I worked on recently for the National Gallery in London.

It accompanies an incredible new exhibition – the first dedicated to the artist in the UK – which has just opened and runs until the 23 August 2026.

If you’re in the UK, or planning on visiting this summer, I really do recommend checking it out.

You might also be interested in my recent piece:

Looking at his work today, it’s hard to imagine that Francisco de Zurbarán spent so many years in the wilderness. But it’s true. Commissioned mainly by religious orders, cloistered in churches and monasteries, much of his art remained hidden from view, by which time fashions had changed, other painters had come and gone, other ways of seeing had taken centre stage.

It was only as the Spanish monasteries were plundered by Napoleon’s generals in the early 19th century, followed by the secularisation of church property, that this startling art came to light. The French king Louis Philippe I was a fan. His collection of Spanish paintings housed in the Louvre between 1838 and 1848 featured 81 works by Zurbarán, more than any other painter. Even Velázquez.

Here, they were seen by French artists of the time. Corot, Courbet, and a young Manet. One can only imagine the impression their almost uncanny modernity must have made – on the latter especially – and how this influence seeped into the painters who followed. Manet’s ‘elegant awkwardness’ (the phrase is Zola’s) and flatness, the discrete nature of his subjects, his focus on the picture plane – all are key features of Zurbarán.

It means that for all their strangeness, there’s something recognisable about them. From the other side of all that painterly innovation, our eye remains reassured by what it finds, even if their austere religiosity is far less familiar to us these days. These paintings are ‘realist’, but not only that. They might even be thought of as ‘hyper-real’, which pushes all the right post-modern buttons, while at the same time showing us a very different world, bound by the power of symbol and iconography.

I’m fairly new to Zurbarán. But working on the exhibition over the last few months, I’ve become spellbound. His painting played a very distinct role during its own time, reasserting the power of ecclesiastical storytelling in a post-Reformation world, and offering a guide to – and a catalyst for – devotional practice in line with the medieval scholastic tradition.

Today, it can still be read this way, but might also be seen as a cipher to modes of knowing that reach beyond those anthropocentric imperatives which make our world too often seem absent of magic, meaning or mystical wonder. We need such things after all. An artist like Zurbarán speaks to what is sacred in our hearts. All we have to do is listen.

1. The Crucifixion (1627)

This is the painting that made Zurbarán’s name, created when he was 29 years old. It bears many of the hallmarks for which he would become known. The stark realism. The extreme chiaroscuro. The masterly rendering of fabric. The raw spiritual power. It was kept behind a grille in a dimly lit chapel in the Dominican monastery of San Pablo el Real in Seville. It is Zurbarán’s first signed and dated work. It was so ‘lifelike’ that many of those who saw it thought it was a sculpture. It embodies the principles of the Tridentine catechism. The ideas of pleroma and kenosis. The divine made flesh.

2. Saint Peter Nolasco’s Vision of Saint Peter (1629)

Just two years later came this remarkable image. It was commissioned by the Calced Mercedarians as part of a series depicting the life of their founder, St Peter Nolasco. This order was known for swapping themselves for Catholic captives held by Moorish forces. It shows a vision he was said to have had of his namesake, St Peter the Apostle, who was crucified but insisted that his cross be inverted. He felt unworthy dying in the same manner as Christ. Drawing once more on Zurbarán’s preference for chiaroscuro, the painting sets its subjects in an indeterminate space, a here (acá) and a there (allá), denoting both heaven and earth, a merging of the spiritual and material realms that would be a consistent feature of his work for years to come.

3. St. Bonaventure at Prayer (1628-29)

The celestial and tellurian spheres are conjoined once again in this masterly composition from the same period. The kneeling saint appealing to angelic forces to help answer a question of theological politics down here on Earth – the election of a new pope, symbolised by the conclave of scarlet-clad cardinals on the right. The angel points off-screen, beyond the parameters of the painting. It is not simply a case of two distinct ‘realities’ or realms, but also of two conceptions of time, the temporal and the eternal. Chronos and kairos. The latter transforms the former, the spiritual gives meaning and shape to the material, making moments in time that matter.

4. Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose (1633)

In his rare still life works, Zurbarán distills this idea of material/spiritual congruity into one of aesthetic purity. Here, matter is made sacred. This is the best of them. The only one that is signed and dated. ‘The fruit’s combined fierce materiality and celestial beauty channel the artist’s genius,’ writes Peter Schjeldahl. The metallic glint on that silver plate; the precise weave on that wicker basket; the shadow cast on those oranges. Ask yourself: has anyone ever painted a lemon as perfectly as this?

5. Saint Francis in Meditation (1635-39)

Of all the works exhibited in Louis Philippe’s Spanish Gallery, this was the one that garnered most attention, the one seen as the epitome of ‘Spanish-ness’ in art. It shows Zurbarán’s tenebrism in full effect. And the darkness matters. Not just aesthetically, but as a point of meaning within the painting. A mode of apophatic theology. La noche oscura del alma. The darkness signals the absolute unknowability of God, but also the state in which we might strive to ‘reach’ Him, putting aside the intellect and rational thought, in favour of loving contemplation. Existing within the ineffable.

6. Saint Margaret of Antioch (1630-34)

Alongside the likes of St. Francis and St. Bonaventure, Zurbarán painted a host of female saints, of which this is one of the most memorable. Margaret refused to renounce her Christian faith and cede her virginity to a Roman Governor, and was subject to various tortures and trials as a result. One of these involved being swallowed by Satan in the form of the dragon you can see at her feet. Zurbarán once again leans on his mastery of shadow, almost concealing the creature completely. But notice that glint of white on the tooth and the blush of red on tongue, picking up on her skirt and shirt respectively. And also the way their feet almost mirror each other. She is resolute. He is almost penitent. Dressed as a shepherd, she becomes the patron of expectant mothers, steward of life over death, good over evil.

7. Christ and the Virgin in the House at Nazareth (c. 1640)

The scene is invented. A teenage Christ sits with his mother in their home in Nazareth. While she darns a white garment (notice the thimble on her middle finger), he weaves a crown of thorns. Look closely and you can see she is crying. And that he has pricked his finger. We know what this portends. Mary knows too. The painting is a distillation of all things Zurbarán. Visual storytelling at its finest, fusing elements of symbolic still life with rich and emotive characterisation. Metaphysically complex, as ever. Once again, depicting the coexistence of two realms, the dark earthbound sky seen through the window on the right juxtaposed with the heavenly orange light above Jesus on the left (I’ve counted 17 cherubim here, but there may be more). And yet again, conveying two notions of time, present and future, the tick of chronos and the tock of kairos, the appointed time, in this case of Christ’s death and sacrifice.

8. The Virgin of the Carthusians (1655)

Zurbarán has the ability to shift between a kind of primitive photorealism and a self-reflexive symbolism – the latter clearly distilled in this magnificent later work, which is one of my favourites. Compositionally faultless, it veers towards tableaux vivant. Notice how carefully the flowers at the bottom have been positioned, as if placed by hand. Witness the faces of the monks: benevolent, awestruck, a little fearful even. Look at that blue cape, the way it’s held by the two angels and drapes down on either side, the pure blackness beneath, how it separates the heavenly and terrestrial realms, the chromatic contrast with the Virgin’s padparadscha robe and the monks’ white cowls. Convince me that anyone has ever painted folds in fabric better than this.

9. The Crucified Christ with a Painter (c. 1650)

Along with the Immaculate Conception, Zurbarán returns to the subject of the Crucifixion again and again. This is his final effort. Probably. Aside from the date, much of the debate around this work involves the figure of the painter. Is it simply St Luke, patron saint of artists, or is there an element of self-portraiture? If so, it would be the only time Zurbarán ever painted himself into his work. A more intriguing question centres around what is actually going on here. Is it an artist transplanted in time and space to Golgotha? Is it an artist stood in front of a painting he has just completed? Or even a polychrome sculpture he is putting the finishing touches to? Is it a vision the artist is having? There’s a suggestion of landscape at the very bottom, but is that simply in the painting this painting depicts? Is that smear of white on the palette – the same as the loincloth – a clue? In its own way then, this work is as audacious as Velázquez’s Las Meninas, representative of that same epistemic turning point in art and representation that Foucault talks of, but centred not on a domestic scene from the Royal Court, but on the defining moment of Christian history.

‘Zurbarán’ is at the National Gallery in London from 2 May to 23 August 2026

In every generation, two opposing impulses. One to preserve, the other to destroy. Eros and Thanatos. St Pancras and Euston. Either way, the question of what comes next remains – ‘utopian future’ or ‘fantasy past’. Here, they’ve leaned into the latter. But that’s ok. One imagines the past in this part of Leeds will always be preferable to the future late-stage capitalism has in store for it. Thus, we have honest, well-kept beer and honest, well-cooked food. Brit-brasserie style. It’s not flawless, but what is? The past was never perfect. What matters is that love, not cynicism, has won the day.

This is part of the 100 Word Pubs series, which you can view here

What seems lost in our understanding of community space these days can be found flourishing in many a Scottish watering hole. And this is one of the best. Unwittingly optimised for plurality, this place gathers people like a flame gathers moths. Every demographic and disposition. Hipsters to hip replacements. A shrine to the atavistic forces that compel us to agglomerate. An alcohol-fuelled agora in which to celebrate the glorious similitude that binds us and commiserate the dark secrets we share in our hearts. Oh, to be human! And to be in Glasgow, and be in here, and be legion again.

This is part of the 100 Word Pubs series, which you can view here

I hesitate to offer up a pub purely for its food. But then I went here. The bar is passable, but it’s what’s behind the curtain that counts. A well-appointed dining room. And chefs who clearly care about what leaves the kitchen. As befitting the bird theme, I had duck, which was excellent. The fact it came with an offal sausage, even better. Regarding vegetables, the menu speaks for itself: ‘Braised leeks, pecorino sauce, smoked mushrooms’. The bread was warm, the butter whipped, as it should be. The coup de maître: a bucket of chocolate mousse served à la russe.

This is part of the 100 Word Pubs series, which you can view here

“In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work…”

So much has been written about W.G. Sebald that I hesitate to add more words to the pile. By the time I discovered his work, he’d already been thrust into the pantheon of modern masters, his style and method much imitated.

The thing is… I was there at the University of East Anglia during the time he was teaching, just one building down, but had no idea who he was. So that later discovery felt fated in some way, but also like I’d missed something right in front of my eyes.

Interestingly enough, I came to him by a route as circuitous as his narrative technique. I was wandering around Tate Britain one day when I stumbled upon a film by Tacita Dean called Michael Hamburger (2007). It follows the eponymous poet around his Suffolk orchard as he explains his passion for growing rare varieties of apple.

What struck me about Dean’s focus on cultivation was that it suggested an unspoken counterpoint: the destructive forces that displaced Hamburger as a young boy. He fled Germany with his family in the year Hitler was appointed Chancellor.

Sebald himself left Germany some 30 years later, eventually settling in East Anglia where he and Hamburger became friends. Dean had been asked to produce a work inspired by Sebald and came to Hamburger through The Rings Of Saturn.

It was after learning the source of the film’s inspiration that I bought a copy on the Charing Cross Road sometime soon after, in 2008, although the one pictured above is the 2016 New Directions edition. The book was first published in 1995, during my undergraduate years in Norwich.

The German title of the work gives a more explicit idea of its contents: Die Ringe des Saturn. Eine englische Wallfahrt. In one sense ‘an English pilgrimage’ describes it perfectly. The narrator / Sebald figure sets out on an epic walk around Suffolk and describes his progress – perambulations which form the basis of a deeper journey that ranges discursively from topic to topic, transcending the boundaries of time and space.

The 17th-century polymath Sir Thomas Browne; diplomat and Irish revolutionary Roger Casement; the Dowager Empress Tz’u-Hsi; Rembrandt; Swinburne; Conrad; Chateaubriand; the herring fishing industry; the Norwich silk trade; the decline of English seaside towns; the destruction of Europe in WWII.

This ‘novel’ charts the human mystery in a great many of its guises, and if we sense a surfeit of melancholy or morbidity at times, we might also detect a great curiosity, empathy and playfulness. Like Dante, Sebald’s work reveals the promise of hope, not its absence.

It’s easy to understand why he became lionised by the Academy. His style invites the kind of hermeneutic speculation upon which the system thrives, although I can’t help but resist its claim. Sure, his prose is robust, but it nevertheless demands solicitude, not the hammer blows theory often dishes up. This isn’t to deny its scholarly aspect, but instead to suggest that his writing, like Hamburger’s orchard, be treated with due care and attention.

Sebald demonstrates our sensitivity to difficult truths and is one of the great excavators of the strange reality we have created for ourselves. This wonderful book charts an endless flow of historical intersections, myriad meeting points between image and text, meaning and memory, past and present, and the perennial conflict between our grand endeavours and inevitable hubris.

Out of this vertiginous collage the question of how we are to respond to the world’s aporia springs forth. The answer: we must carry on growing apples. And we must do so with great fidelity and watchfulness, in the hope of discovering those hitherto unseen pathways to our own amelioration. Then one day we may even reach the rings of Saturn, or some other place far beyond the horizon of our present limitations.

Available in this Vintage Voyages edition. See my Bookshop.org page for this and all other From the Library selections.

I’m happy to report there’s been lots of new subscribers this week, so I just wanted to offer a taste of the kind of things you can expect here. A thematic way-finding tool and introduction to the site, if you will. It’s really great to welcome you!

Books

No surprise for a Substack, I often write about books. Favourites, influences, stuff in my collection etc. Things like this:

Marcel Proust

I’ve been obsessed with Proust for years. I’ve serialised my book, Oh, That More Such Flowers May Come Tomorrow, on here. It’s a quasi-fictional take on my experience reading In Search Of Lost Time. You can find it all here:

Films

I love writing about films. At its best, film is probably my favourite medium. I’m endeavouring to get through Sight & Sound’s top 100, but it’s slow-going. Stuff like this:

Music

I dabble in music. I released a solo album last year. And I play drums in a band. I sometimes write about it too, in an effort to get under the skin of my own relationship with music-making. Here’s something about how and why I became a drummer:

Pubs

I have a project of ongoing pub reviews limited to exactly 100 words. Kind of tiny prose poems devoted to the art of pub-going. This kind of thing:

Fiction

I post some occasional fiction. Short stories mostly, like this one:

Miscellany

Then there are other occasional bits and pieces. Often essays, but sometimes things like this:

Thanks for subscribing! Thoughts and comments (and likes!) always welcome. :)

Ben

Share Bite My Truant Pen

I’m a huge fan of Ian Nairn’s wonderful book, Nairn’s London, which is perhaps best described as the author’s personal journey around the notable buildings of England’s capital, written in his own inimitable style, a kind of highly perceptive poetry of place.

First published in 1966, it paints of picture of a London that is now partially lost. Buildings closed, destroyed, repurposed. Amid the phantoms, and despite all the change, much is still recognisable. All the Wrens and Hawksmoors, for instance. Thankfully, despite inevitable attrition, the same can be said for many of the pubs Nairn expressed an inclination towards.

For Nairn possessed a deft hand when it came to combining the sacred and the profane. He was a great lover of beer and true devotee of the British boozer. And his book includes references to some thirty pubs he thought worth the trouble.

With this in mind, I’ve put together this little tour, which encompasses eight of those pubs, starting at The Lord’s Tavern in St John’s Wood (A) and ending at The St George’s Tavern in Pimlico (H), Nairn’s local. The map below shows the route and the list underneath the locations of the pubs featured.

Link to map

A) The Lord’s Tavern, St John’s Wood Road, NW8 8QP

And then, inside, like the pearl in the oyster, the tiny oval of green, the heart of all cricket, on view for the price of a Guinness. (NL, p. 104)

B) The Barley Mow, Dorset Street, W1U 6QW

Just off Baker Street; a real pub, a proper local, with a Public on the street and the most sober of Saloons as a back bar. The really remarkable thing is the pair of mini-bars on the way to the saloon. Tiny cubicles with high walls and two chairs, places for romantic indiscretion or flogging atomic secrets. (NL, p. 98-99)

C) The Lamb, Lamb’s Conduit Street, WC1N 3LZ

A good Victorian pub, low, dark and intimate. (NL, p. 112)

D) Cittie of Yorke, High Holborn, WC1V 6BN

Any long bar implies serious drinking, but this has a sense of dedication that is far beyond mere commerce. Perhaps because of this it is often cram-full: it is more of an experience to be uncomfortable here than to relax amongst a farrago of cliches. (NL, p. 109)

E) The Wellington, The Strand, WC2R 0HS

Extraordinary-ordinary; comfortable and quietly elegant and what every pub or street should be and isn’t. (NL, p. 87)

F) The Salisbury, St Martin’s Lane, WC2N 4AP

Real West End glitter, with all the stops pulled out. In the middle of theatre-land, just about the perfect theatre bar, with as much sparkle as a brandy-and-soda. (NL, p. 73)

G) The Red Lion, Duke of York Street, SW1Y 6JP

It is the spirit exactly of Manet’s ‘Bar at the Folies Bergère’. It sees and feel everything, yet you are thrown back on your own resources, enriched. This is the opposite thing to the gentle, sentimental pub where you can wash your troubles into oblivion. (NL, p. 78)

H) St George’s Tavern, Belgrave Road, SW1V 1QD

Nairn’s regular, near to where he lived in Pimlico.

So, if you’re ever in London and need refreshment, why not pick up a copy of Nairn’s London, hit the streets, and raise a glass to one of Britain’s greatest ever writers on architecture and the built environment.

Cheers!

It seems like a long time ago. When the Internet was actually good. Or at least not really bad.

Before mass surveillance was baked in, and everything was owned by the worst people in the world, and the whole thing began melting our minds and twisting reality to the point where truth itself lost all meaning. You know, when it was just about cats doing silly shit.

I’m sure I was happier then. I liked dialling in. I liked AltaVista. I liked it when there were entire websites devoted to making giant versions of your favourite chocolate bars and biscuits (pimpthatsnack.com) or dogs dressed as bees (beedogs.com).

Given how screwed the world clearly is right now, and how much it is driving me crazy, I wanted to offer a moment of respite from the madness. To take us back to a simpler time, to pluck out some digital diamonds from the silicon valley of shit, and share with you nine websites that I love. Websites that are… like… nice. And fun. And interesting. And not evil.

So, in no particular order, here goes:

1. Apollo 11 in Real Time

Featuring real audio, footage and telemetry from the Apollo 11 mission, this site offers users the chance to follow the journey to the moon in real time. Join in-progress as the experience loops, mapped to the exact time in 1969, or opt to start at t-minus 1 minute to launch. Stellar.

2. Studs Terkel Radio Archive

One of the great interviewers, Studs Terkel talked to some of the most fascinating people of the 20th century – from Muhammad Ali to Bob Dylan to Toni Morrison – during his 45 years at WFMT Radio in Chicago. Here you can access an archive of over 2,000 of his original recordings, capturing the voices and history of the American century.

3. UbuWeb

Film. Sound. Dance. Poetry. Conceptual Art. This site is a brilliant resource of avant-garde art and creativity, featuring material by, and about, everyone from Nan Goldin to Ornette Coleman, Man Ray to Merce Cunningham.

4. The Nightly

An endless radio station that plays sad, old, gloomy and obscure music. Especially good after dark, with a single malt and a real fire.

Subscribe for more stuff like this, plus writing on books, film and art. It’s free.

Subscribe now

5. Clive James

Archive of the legendary TV pundit and intellectual, Clive James, this site offers a treasure trove of incisive cultural commentary. Essays, extracts, poetry and video. It’s the perfect companion to his 2007 book, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time, and reveals James for the witty and perspicacious prose stylist he was. Essential.

6. Penguin Classic Cover Generator

Hours of fun making your own Penguin Classics covers. What’s not to like? A brilliant idea, brilliantly executed.

7. Radiooooo

Another online radio station. Select a year and a country and it plays music from that year and country. Simple. And properly amazing. Opening up the world in a way that feels much needed in times like these. (Thanks to SP Murphy for the recommendation)

8. Intertapes

More brilliant audio. An evolving collection of found cassette tapes from around the world, including voice memos, field recordings, mixtapes, bootlegs and more. Weird and slightly uncanny. But in a good way.

9. Proust FM

Inspired by many of the above sites, this is my own contribution. Proust FM offers a continuous broadcast of Marcel Proust’s masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time. Played on a loop, forever. You can also start from the very beginning, select a chapter, or leave and pick up where you left off. Perfect for those sleepless nights.

If you have any other websites to recommend, I’d love to hear about them. Please just leave a comment below.

I’m really pleased to share a new digital audio project I’ve been working on.

Proust FM is a free website that offers a continuous audio broadcast of Marcel Proust’s masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time.* Played on a loop, forever.

Like a radio station found in the early hours, the narrative keeps moving, inviting you to step randomly into the stream of the story and immerse yourself in the sinuous beauty of Proust’s prose.

You can also start from the very beginning, select a chapter, or leave and pick up where you left off on your return. Any way you choose to listen, it’s particularly good for those long nights when sleep is hard to come by.

This was a labour of love, so I really hope you enjoy it.

Bon voyage mes amis…

VISIT PROUST FM

*At the moment it features the first three volumes (Swann’s Way, Within A Budding Grove and The Guermantes Way) only, but I’ll be adding the following volumes (the C.K. Scott Moncrieff translations) – which are all now in the public domain – in due course.

Direct links to chapters:

Swann’s Way: Overture

Swann’s Way: Combray

Swann’s Way: Swann In Love Part 1

Swann’s Way: Swann In Love Part 2

Swann’s Way: Place-Names The Name

Within A Budding Grove: Madame Swann At Home

Within A Budding Grove: Place-Names The Place

Within A Budding Grove: Place-Names The Place (Continued)

Within A Budding Grove: Seascape, With Frieze Of Girls

The Guermantes Way: Chapter One (Part 1)

The Guermantes Way: Chapter One (Part 2)

The Guermantes Way: Chapter One (Part 3)

The Guermantes Way: Chapter Two (Part 1)

The Guermantes Way: Chapter Two (Part 2)

The Guermantes Way: Chapter Two (Part 3)

This is the perfect place to come in the daytime. When it’s not too busy and you should really be doing something else. Like work. At 2pm on a Tuesday, say, when drinking feels quietly transgressive, deliciously errant. When you can put the quotidian world aside and dream of a different life entirely. Maybe even imagine yourself an artist, unbound by vulgar orthodoxy. That this is your Garrick Club and you are Kingsley Amis. Slowly, reality reveals its pent-up magic. You’ve found ataraxia at last, and it was waiting for you all along in a charming Kemptown alehouse painted orange.

This is part of the 100 Word Pubs series, which you can view here

Sister to the Southampton Arms in Kentish Town, this wonderful pub brings that same charm to the streets of Islington. I’m not usually a fan of franchises, but when the beer’s this decent and there’s a sausage roll on offer, I’ll throw almost any principle out the window. Per the formula, wood abounds. But wood is good. As it goes, these sororal similarities preclude dialectics. We might imagine instead a process of quantum entanglement, or bilocation, à la Émilie Sagée. An apple, cleft in two, is not more twin than these two creatures. The cider tastes as sweet in both.

This is part of the 100 Word Pubs series, which you can view here

This might just be the best pub in London. Which means it’s possibly the best pub in the UK. Thus, probably the best pub on Earth. It only serves two beers. But they’re both so good, why bother with more. Oh, and one gin. Gordon’s. And wine, either house red or white. That’s it. The faces of the clientele are quietly gruntled. They hold a secret. They’ve plumbed the depths of the city and come up clutching this pearl. They’ll soon order another pint. And a pork pie. The bartender will proffer a jar of Colman’s. The universe will align.

This is part of the 100 Word Pubs series, the rest of which you can view here