The Broken Compass

The Broken Compass

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Essays

Hosannas and hatchet jobs
The how and why of the reviews I write: pitching for commissions, the process of reading and writing, and the rules I try to stick to along the way
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Mathew Lyons
2
Domingos Sequeira and his greenish friends
Why I fell in love with a painting in Lisbon's National Museum of Ancient Art
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Mathew Lyons
10
Bad choices and dangerous friends: the fugitive promise of George Gascoigne
Why one of Elizabethan England's great literary innovators died a broken man
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Mathew Lyons
9
Walking into darkness
My father, Alzheimer’s, and the ends of life
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Mathew Lyons
The sense-haunted ground: landscape, memory and Normandy 1944
A long essay I wrote last year about the Battle of Normandy – now published in one piece for the first time
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Mathew Lyons
12
Minstrels and players and spies, oh my
How medieval and early-modern mobility provided many opportunities for reward
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Mathew Lyons
7
Amelia Earhart and the first freedoms of the air
The short, happy life of an American icon
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Mathew Lyons
1
As I walked out from Henley Street one morning… (part two)
Steps towards a psychogeography of Shakespeare's childhood landscapes
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Mathew Lyons
As I walked out from Henley Street one morning… (part one)
Steps towards a psychogeography of Shakespeare's Stratford
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Mathew Lyons
2
Russell Hoban: inside the mystery of language
Marking his centenary with a celebration of the profound mischiefs and magic of his work
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Mathew Lyons
17
Nottingham alabaster: objects of strangeness, mystery and devotion
How the English Reformation tried to obliterate a unique medieval artform
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Mathew Lyons
10
Blood on the Tracks at 50
The tangled history of one of Bob Dylan's finest albums
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Mathew Lyons
9
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