Ange Mlinko

On 2 July 1914, violent thunderstorms heralded the publication in London of the first Vorticist magazine, Blast. Since January that year, there had been the threat of insurrection from the Ulster rebels; 937 strikes; 107 arson attacks by suffragettes (who also slashed Velásquez and Sargent paintings in the National Gallery); only four days earlier the Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been...

If modernism is our antiquity, as T.J. Clark has claimed, then Barbara Guest was a devout classicist. No American poet – with the exception of John Ashbery – so reverently extended early modernist aesthetics into the second half of the 20th century. As Guest put it in her essay ‘Radical Poetics and Conservative Poetry’, ‘everything we loved, emulated, was...

We went to the vivarium – to see the tropical butterflies in a walk-through biodome. They were cocooning, their insides filled with meconium. The cocoons looked like jade and rosy quartz pendants for ladies’ ears – with gold worked in, something Babylonian. Enormous specimens breathed against treebark.

Belated naturalists we. I kept repeating to myself: the...

Robert Oppenheimer knew Sanskrit. Quotations from the Bhagavad Gita flashed through his mind when he witnessed the first atomic explosion in New Mexico in 1945: ‘Suppose a thousand suns should rise together into the sky: such is the glory of the Shape of the Infinite God.’ Reading that same chapter of the Bhagavad Gita in Darjeeling in 1962, Allen Ginsberg thought of something...