E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Sad news. Sebastian Horsley , the Soho artist, drug addict, and blaspheming sex-writer, has died. Few people have attempted to live to its logical (or illogical) conclusions the alarming role of the decadent dandy - a fusion of Wilde , Crowley , and an opium-eater - with the discipline and sartorial charm of Horsley - a friend of a friend of mine ( Louise Bak ) and someone I met recently at the launch of Cosmo Landesman' s book. His play had recently opened. A shame he closed his own book so soon.

AN ARTHUR RIMBAUD DRIFT is a poetic walk following the London trail of Arthur Rimbaud and his fellow poet Paul Verlaine , who first visited the English capital - which they called Leun Deun - in September 1872. The route goes from Charing Cross Station, where the poets arrived, through French Soho, where they first lived, and ends up at the legendary 8 Royal College Street where they had a proto-surrealist bust-up over a fish. Poet Niall McDevitt has gleaned the great biographies of Rimbaud by Enid Starkie , Jean-Luc Steinmetz , Charles Nicholls and Graham Robb , as well as Joanna Richardsons' excellent biography of Verlaine , and has mapped out many of the most significant Rimbaud/Verlaine sites. It is worth remembering that of Rimbaud's meteorically brief literary career, 14 months were spent in London, that he wrote some of A Season in Hell in London , most of Illuminations , and that the latter is one of the city's outstanding literary landmarks, a modernist classi...