Mazes in The London Magazine

When I had just left Oxford, I spent, as many new graduates do, many weeks sending out things to magazines. I still have the list: it encompasses a whole page of A4 in my journal. Some of them I sent CVs, begging for work experience or internships; others I sent bad short stories and worse poetry. One of the ones I dreamed about publishing in was The London Magazine. From the first great age of magazines, and founded in 1783, this was the place where Thomas de Quincey wrote about opium-eating; Shelley, Hazlitt and Keats all contributed; later on it was a home for Eliot, Auden and Waugh, and later still William Boyd, Nadine Gordimer and Derek Walcott. Beautifully produced (I was told by Jeremy Lewis that it was done from a shed in the editor's garden), and full of interesting things that were not pegged to the general round of public relations and trends, it seemed one of the pinnacles of literary life. So I am absolutely delighted to have a piece in the June/July issue, on mazes, which is also a review of Charlotte Higgins and Henry Eliot's books on the subject. There's plenty of lovely things in the mag, too, including a poem by Frieda Hughes, short stories and essays. Their website is here.