Nicholas Spice

Brexit will give us back control of our borders. For the person who is temperamentally safer at home than abroad, this makes sense and can only be good. But for me the UK Border is a threat not a reassurance. Theresa May presumably felt a deep affinity with the Border Force when she was home secretary. She’s someone who likes things to be well defined. She has her red lines. She’s the exception to the adage ‘Nomen est omen’: she should have been called Theresa Must.

How he didn’t buckle under the weight of his circumstances, how he remained unbroken by such pain and loss, how, despite it all, he kept writing, would seem almost a miracle of fortitude were it not for the suspicion that his creative life required him to live on the cusp of ruin, to the extent even of an unconscious calibration of misfortune with productivity.

Agnes Martin​’s lifelong dedication to simplicity of mind was perhaps made easier (it was certainly not impeded) by the faint trace of simple-mindedness in her nature. Had she not had about her a touch of the holy fool, the strange and specialised soul of a secular saint, her life and work would not have attained its compelling singularity. She famously said that the artist should...

Among​ the leading Austrian writers of the postwar period, Marlen Haushofer is an unobtrusive presence. Where Bachmann and Bernhard, Handke and Jelinek all in their time achieved international recognition, Haushofer hung back, failing to take the chance, when it came, to break beyond Austrian borders, and, at her untimely death (she died of bone cancer in 1970, three weeks short of her...

In one of the European galleries at the British Museum, there’s a bronze medal of Erasmus made in Antwerp in 1519 by the artist Quentin Metsys. A portrait of Erasmus in profile is on the front of the medal. On the reverse, the smiling bust of Terminus, the Roman god of boundaries, and the words ‘concedo nulli’ – ‘I yield to no one.’ It’s said that Erasmus kept a figurine of the god Terminus on his desk. He wrote: ‘Out of a profane god I have made myself a symbol exhorting decency in life. For death is the real terminus that yields to no one.’