Clare Bucknell

Three of​ Rachel Ruysch’s paintings feature pineapples. In Still Life of Exotic Flowers on a Marble Ledge (c.1735), the fruit is hidden in a chaotic mass of stems and blooms, easy to miss behind an immense white flower head. In A Still Life with Devil’s Trumpet Flowers, Peonies, Hibiscus, Passion Flowers and Other Plants in a Brown Stoneware Vase (1700), you can see it clearly in...

Minds and bodies​ are often at odds with each other in Eimear McBride’s novels. In The Lesser Bohemians (2016), the narrator, Eily, gets so anxious giving a blowjob that she makes her actor-boyfriend recite Richard III to get her through it:

Nowisthewinterofourdiscontentmadeglorioussummerbythissonofyork and allthecloudsthatloured upon our house inthedeepbosomofthe ocean   ...

‘Summer Night’ (1906-7)

Piet Mondrian​ liked to claim that his life had been a straight line. ‘I started off as a naturalist,’ he told a journalist who visited his studio in Paris in 1922. ‘I soon felt a need for a more severe reduction and limitation of my means, and gradually became more abstract.’ He had an album of reproductions of his work on hand...

Creative​ and destructive drives can be hard to tell apart. In Rochester’s ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’, a poem about premature ejaculation, the speaker blusters about his penis’s usual prowess:

Stiffly Resolv’d t’would Carelesly invadeWoman, nor Man, nor ought its fury stayd –Where ere it pierc’d a Cunt it found or made –

Making and wrecking,...

Novelists​ like to snoop inside their characters’ underwear drawers. In Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes (1926), Laura, the heroine, finds her sister-in-law Caroline difficult to read, except in one telling aspect:

Once only did she speak her spiritual mind to Laura. Laura was nursing her when she had influenza; Caroline wished to put on a clean nightdress, and Laura,...