by Cécile Menon and Frederic Raphael

In preparation of this section dedicated to Sarah Raphael, I asked her father, Frederic Raphael, for permission to include a couple of articles dealing with the violent headaches which the artist experienced from an early age and which, from 1996 onwards, became a crippling condition affecting her life and the course of her work. Sarah Raphael had expressed herself publicly about this condition several times, but on suggesting to Clive James that we include these articles I encountered some strikingly fierce opposition. Talking about the artist’s illness was not our purpose, he said. Our subject was her art.

Sarah Raphael was born in the Old Mill House, East Bergholt, on the tenth of August 1960. The cottage had once belonged to John Constable's father. Later, we bought a house not far away, in Langham, which was still  in Constable country: Langham church is featured in one of Constable's best known landscapes. It would be fanciful to suggest that East Anglia infected her with the aptitude which Sarah seemed to possess from birth, but she was promptly responsive to place, as to people. We travelled a good deal during her childhood, first to Spain, then to Rome and finally to Greece. Of all the places we lived, the island of Ios in the Cyclades was dearest to her. Later she would call it simply, 'That place'.

by Frederic Raphael

(In Love was first published 1953 then re-issued by Peter Owen, with a foreword by Frederic Raphael, in 2007)

by Frederic Raphael

An angry film director: ‘You wouldn’t talk to me like that if I had my writers with me.’

The collapse of religion also impoverishes secular philosophy. In the elimination of illusion, the scope of truth also contracts. A low church of ideas, without mystery, without charm, without beauty, takes the place of Higher Things. The seven new devils are moving into the exorcised house.

The future is in the storage-jars which, after Dedalus’ flight, were discovered to be empty.

Hypocrisy partakes of something noble. Who is more devoid of human interest than those with nothing to hide?

Aesthetic movements seek to recruit artists into marching in step; which is all that is required for them to abandon art.