We’re due to meet in the piazza outside the British Library. The day is warm; it would be hot if it weren’t for the intermittent push of the breeze. The piazza looks faintly foreign – the sky a lazy, unrealistic azure against the decisive angles of red brick. Every so often a thick, fumy gust of Kin...

George Shaw, ‘The Silver Birch.’ © The Artist. Courtesy Wilkinson Gallery, London. #| Beginnings matter. Liz Berry opens ‘The Silver Birch’ with the strange self-defeating logic of paradox: ‘Let me tell you about the sex I knew / before sex’. It’s a tease worthy of John Donne: a perfectly un...