Poetry
What’s On in South Devon gave me three choices: functioning psychotic preacher, bingo or a poetry evening
I’m such a constitutional lightweight lately that I’ve started looking on the website What’s On in South Devon for things…
There’s nothing wrong with getting into Thomas Tallis on the back of Fifty Shades of Grey
Great works of art may have a strange afterlife. Deracinated from the world that created them they are at the…
The Shading Out of Poetry by Deadline
Like old-time washerwomen floodwater is sousing trees and shrubs out on the drainage. Floating wrack dribbles seaward from their labour.…
Tom Eliot — a very practical cat. Did T.S. Eliot simply recycle every personal experience into poetry?
T.S. Eliot may have put much of his early life into his poetry, says Daniel Swift, but The Waste Land remains a marvellous mystery that defies explanation
The risks of being an Englishman on Burns Night
I’m rubbish at public speaking and detest it. Even the thought of reciting an English poem of my choice at…
On the Yeats trail in Galway
The Go Galway bus from Dublin sounds an unlikely pleasure, but it is both comfortable and punctual. There is free…
Sunday roasts and beaded bubbles: dining with the poets
In December 1817 Benjamin Robert Haydon — vivid diarist and painter of huge but inferior canvases of historic events —…
Why radio is a surprisingly good medium for talking about art
You might think it a fool’s errand to attempt programmes about art on the wireless. How can you talk about…
Wendy Cope on hating school, meeting Billy Graham and enduring Freudian analysis
A surprise! I took this book from its envelope expecting a fresh collection of Wendy Cope’s poems, and opened it…
We know that war is hell. But it doesn’t ever make us stop doing it
There’s a plausible theory — recently rehearsed in the BBC’s excellent two-part documentary The Lion’s Last Roar? — that our…
Ezra Pound – the fascist years
‘There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?/ They don’t make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb,…
Clive James on his late flowering: ‘I am in the slightly embarrassing position where I write poems saying I’m about to die and then don’t’
Clive James on poetry, civilisation and the critical benefits of facing leukaemia
Peter Levi – poet, priest and life-enhancer
Hilaire Belloc was once being discussed on some television programme. One of the panellists was Peter Levi. The other critics…
The biography that makes Philip Larkin human again
We needn’t apologise for Philip Larkin any longer, says Peter J. Conradi. His place is unmistakeably among the greats
Sorbet with Rimbaud
The Bloomsbury of the title refers to the place, not the group. The group didn’t have a poet. ‘I would…
You owe it to yourself to visit John Clare country
This has been a terrible year for horseflies. It’s bad enough if you’re human: often by the time you swat…
How good an artist is Edmund de Waal?
For Edmund de Waal a ceramic pot has a ‘real life’ that goes beyond functionalism.This handsome book (designed by Atelier…
Thug, rapist, poetic visionary: the contradictory Earl of Rochester
Philip Hensher on the scandalous 17th-century courtier whose hellfire reputation has overshadowed his fine satirical poetry
My desert island poet
If I had to be marooned on a desert island with a stranger, that stranger would be John Burnside. Not…
Very bad poems on the Underground
My husband was surprised by quite a bit when we travelled by Underground in London the other day. Although he…
A learned poet's mystifying mistakes
I enjoy Poetry Please, but was shouting mildly at the wireless the other day when a northern woman poet was…
Deserter, wifebeater, great poet: the shame and glory of Vernon Scannell
Vernon Scannell was a thief, a liar, a deserter, a bigamist, a fraud, an alcoholic, a woman-beater and a coward.…
What would Auden have deemed evil in our time? European jingoism
‘Goodbye to the Mezzogiorno’ was the first Auden poem that Alexander McCall Smith read in his youth. He discovered it…
Jonathan Aitken's diary: My life as a Christian outreach speaker
The last time I wrote for The Spectator I was sitting in a prison cell. I sent the then editor…
A Strong Song Tows Us, by Richard Burton - review
How minor is minor? ‘Rings a bell’ was more or less the response of two English literature graduates, now successful…
