Dave Tomlin, a musician closely involved with London’s 1960s counterculture, was living in a house in Lancaster Grove some years later when he was served an eviction notice. As he had done before when he needed to find a new place to stay, he set out on a walk, looking for abandoned homes, and his wanderings brought him down Avenue Road in Swiss Cottage…

Dreams of perpetual economic growth and ever-increasing wealth are illusions, and they have blocked our awareness of the sufficiency that is already at hand. The world is being hollowed out and is turning ghostly…

In 1940, Stefan Zweig rented a modest house on a hillside outside Petrópolis, near Rio de Janeiro, and lived there with his second wife, Lotte Altmann…

Angus MacPhee was born in Nettlehole, near Glasgow, but his crofting family returned home to South Uist in the Outer Hebrides a few years later. As a young boy he loved working with horses and showed some talent in music and singing; he also learnt how to make ropes, horse-harnesses, and other useful things from the abundant marram grass that was to be found on the island.

The opening sentence of Hojoki is an expression of mujo, the transience of things, and it echoes the succinct aphorism panta rhei, ‘everything flows’, which is attributed to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus…

As one of the iconic rock musicians of the 1960s, almost all of Eric Clapton’s influences, as well as the challenges that he has faced and overcome, have been exhaustively documented and explored, but it is not widely known that he has much affection for Jean-Christophe, the ten-volume novel by Romain Rolland, published in the journal ‘Cahiers de la Quinzaine’ from 1904 to 1912.

In a collection of essays entitled Art Can Help, the photographer Robert Adams writes about images that evoke beauty without irony or sentimentality, proposing that ‘it is the responsibility of artists to pay attention to the world, pleasant or otherwise, and to help us live respectfully in it’.

In about 1923, John Craske began to make pictures of the sea and the coastline, painting on cardboard, wrapping paper, doors, mantelpieces, jugs, and crockery. He also made toy boats. Later, when he was not able to paint, he made embroideries while sitting upright in bed, supported by cushions. Their subjects are the same as those of his paintings – fishing boats tossed about in rough seas or beached on the shore, a lighthouse illuminating a ship in a storm, sailors being rescued by breeches buoy.

Cheapjack, first published in 1934, is Philip Allingham’s account of the years he spent travelling around markets and fairgrounds in England.

‘Four Roads’, by the Italian director Alice Rohrwacher, was filmed as an experiment during the first pandemic lockdown, using out-of-date stock and an old 16mm camera…

Gef announced to the Irvine family, whose house he inhabited and who were the only people ever to have seen or spoken to him, that he was an ‘earthbound spirit’ and a ‘ghost in the form of a mongoose’.

‘An Egoless Practice’, an article in ‘The Paris Review’ about a book called Tantra Song, is introduced with a description: ‘rendered by hand on found pieces of paper and used primarily for meditation, the works depict deities as geometric, vividly hued shapes and mark a clear departure from Tantric art’s better known figurative styles’…

Thought-Forms - A Record of Clairvoyant Investigation, published in 1901 by the Theosophical Society in London, was written by Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, two leading figures in that organisation…

Treacle Walker, Alan Garner’s recent novel, was published in his 87th year; its epigraph, borrowed from the Italian theoretical physicist, Carlo Rovelli, is ‘Time is ignorance’…

‘Get Back’, the new edit of the 1970 film documentary ‘Let It Be’, takes up their story when the four Beatles, in different ways, had become a little tired and disillusioned…

Fred Herzog liked the ‘grittiness’ and vitality of old Vancouver, then more obviously a port and frontier town, and his plain and evocative photos now read as elegiac images of a lost era in which people acted and lived differently, and where the streetscapes, while often rundown and melancholic, had undoubted character…

The Gospel of Mary, written by an unknown author in the 2nd century CE and lost for over 1500 years, was discovered in Cairo as a fragmentary copy in Coptic translation and brought to Berlin in 1896…

‘Authenticity’, writes Christopher C. King, is founded on social and musical knowledge that is related to place, past, and shared memory, and which creates continuity of perception and understanding…

Silhouettes have often been used in the cinema, but never more ingeniously than in Lotte Reiniger’s silent films…

Shortly before his unexpected death, when asked by an interviewer where he felt most at home, W. G. Sebald replied that it was on Île Saint-Pierre…