Poetry
‘Instapoetry’ may be popular, but most of it is terrible
Poetry is on a hot streak. Last year, sales in the UK topped £12 million for the first time —…
The many faces of William ‘Slasher’ Blake
‘Imagination is my world.’ So wrote William Blake. His was a world of ‘historical inventions’. Nelson and Lucifer, Pitt and…
The joys of Radio 4’s Word of Mouth
I first heard Lemn Sissay talking about his childhood experiences on Radio 4 in 2009. At that time he was…
Haunting and hallucinatory: hospital poems from Hugo Williams
Hugo Williams’s wryly candid reports from the front lines of sex and family life are a perennial delight. Often timeless,…
Up close and personal with Thomas Hardy
I walked in out of the rain, dripping, and sat down beside the fire on the primitive high-backed settle. ‘Is…
The great anti-hero of our time: Diary of a Somebody, by Brian Bilston, reviewed
Brian Bilston’s life is summed up perfectly by the incident with his neighbour’s dog. The annoying Mrs McNulty comes round…
Pam Tanowitz’s Four Quartets is a revelation
T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets is full of music and movement. The players, such as they are, slip, slide, shake, tumble,…
Last lines on Brexit from Geoffrey Hill
In 2012 OUP published Geoffrey Hill’s Collected Poems; they could have waited, because they’re now going to need another edition.…
The celebrated poet who’s been erased from English literature
Biographers are a shady lot. For all their claims about immortalising someone in print, as if their ink were a…
How poetry turned a failing comprehensive into one of Oxford’s most oversubscribed schools
Kate Clanchy is an extraordinary person. She is a veteran of 30 years’ teaching in difficult state schools, as well…
Finding hope in poetry, politics – and white Burgundy
During the Middle Ages, some of the monastic halls which evolved into Oxbridge colleges allowed their younger inmates to indulge…
How Philip Larkin f****d me up
I first came across Philip Larkin’s poem ‘This Be the Verse’ when I was 18 in the late 1970s. You…
Whitby Abbey is at the heart of Britain’s spiritual and literary history
The 199 steps up to the ruins of Whitby Abbey are a pilgrimage; they always have been. And any good…
Why wasn’t Poetry Please in the Radio Times’s top 30 greatest radio shows of all time?
With the upsurge of listeners to Classic FM (now boasted to be 5.6 million listeners each week) and the imminent…
The story of the cook who spent 10 years preparing food for those on death row
You don’t need headphones to appreciate, and catch on to, the unique selling point of radio: its immediacy, its directness,…
I love life – and girls – too much to act my age
New York A little Austrian count was born to my daughter last week in Salzburg, early in the morning of…
Francis of Assisi’s life in poetry will stay in the mind forever
This passionate series of engagements with the life of St Francis will stay in my mind for a very long…
Pithy and profound: the beauty of aphorisms
It’s not surprising, perhaps, that Emil Cioran isn’t much read in England. Born in Romania, but winning a scholarship to…
![A woman-child of dangerous assurance: Allison Cook as Salome in Adena Jacobs’s new production for English National Opera. [Catherine Ashmore]](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/6Octopera.jpg?w=410&h=275&crop=1)
A fascinating failure, but a failure nonetheless: ENO’s Salome reviewed
Yes, Oscar Wilde never wrote it. No, Strauss didn’t intend it. In fact, the composer famously demanded the Dance of…
The night I kissed Harold Pinter
I think everyone was a little nervous of Harold. Including Harold, sometimes. He was affable, warm, generous, impulsive — and…
Like ‘gammon’, ‘spasmodic’ was a term to put down a despised tendency
To find out why the poetry of Ebenezer Jones was thought execrably bad, I turned to The Spectator of September…
Benjamin Zephaniah once found the leg of a man in the back of a Ford Cortina
‘For me rhyming was normal,’ said Benjamin Zephaniah, reading from his autobiography on Radio 4. Back in the 1960s, on…
He, they, fae, fer or ze? Check your pronouns
Jay Bernard won the Ted Hughes Award last week. I managed to hear a snippet of the winning poem on Today…
A Book of Chocolate Saints: an Indian novel like no other
The Indian poet Jeet Thayil’s first novel, Narcopolis, charted a two-decade-long descent into the underworlds of Mumbai and addiction. One…
Trahison des clercs — a phrase that dates back all the way to 1927
I had long associated the phrase trahison des clercs with the writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft, though I can’t put my finger…
