Fiona Sampson

Four female writers at the court of Elizabeth I

27 April 2024 9:00 am

Of Ramie Targoff’s gifted quartet, Mary Sidney was particularly admired by her contemporaries for her translation of the Psalms into English verse

When atonal music was original and exciting

2 December 2023 9:00 am

Alexander Goehr, the sole survivor of the radical Manchester School of Music in the 1960s, describes turning pre-war European tradition into British cutting edge

Walt Whitman’s poetry can change your life

9 May 2020 9:00 am

To describe a new book as ‘eagerly awaited’ is almost unpardonable. Yet Mark Doty’s What is the Grass: Walt Whitman…

Haunting and hallucinatory: hospital poems from Hugo Williams

22 June 2019 9:00 am

Hugo Williams’s wryly candid reports from the front lines of sex and family life are a perennial delight. Often timeless,…

Desperate mothers, abandoned babies: the tragic story of London’s foundlings

4 May 2019 9:00 am

One of the oddest of Bloomsbury’s event venues must be the Foundling Museum. The handsome building on Coram’s Fields houses…

Nan Shepherd’s lonely uphill struggle

6 January 2018 9:00 am

‘It’s a grand thing to get leave to live’, perhaps the most famous line Nan Shepherd wrote, is carved in…

Småland

22 March 2014 9:00 am

Småland’s wooden cottages with sunflowers lack nothing. Brightly-painted, small in the distance like stories, they call the eye on and…