Poetry
John Updike’s letters overflow with lust, ambition, guilt and shame
‘Affairs are cruel, and if they are sin, they carry the punishment with them’, he wrote to one of the many women he cheated on throughout a long life
Childhood illnesses and instability left Patti Smith yearning for ‘sacred mysteries’
Bedridden for much of her youth, she found consolation in music, and a way ‘into fairyland’ through a treasured poetry anthology
Was Queen Victoria’s doctor the first psychoanalyst?
Queen Victoria began to experience dark visions after giving birth to her second child. Concerned that she might have inherited…
Even as literate adults, we need to learn how to read
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst shows us the rewards of reading slowly and attentively – and making connections between seemingly disparate things
The young Tennyson reaches for the stars
Richard Holmes describes how the poet’s early fascination with science – astronomy and geology in particular – would have a lasting influence on his writing
R.S. Thomas – terrific poet, terrible husband
Love’s Moment is one of those quiet radio programmes you’re unlikely to have read about. It aired without fanfare at…
My husband first and last – by Lalla Romano
In a touching memoir, Romano describes a shared intellectual life with Innocenzo Monti, from their first meeting in the Piedmont mountains to their final months together
On the trail of a missing masterpiece: What We Can Know, by Ian McEwan, reviewed
In the archipelago-republic of 22nd-century Britain, a literary scholar becomes obsessed with a long-vanished sonnet sequence and the woman who inspired it
The enigma of C.P. Cavafy
The homosexual poet from Alexandria avoided publication in his lifetime, despite being a ruthless self-promoter with a very high opinion of his own work
How the railways shaped modern culture
Cue track seven of Frank Sinatra’s 1957 album Only the Lonely and you can hear Ol’ Blue Eyes pretending to…
Welcome to the Age of Jerks
How screwed is Britain? I’ve checked with the Impartiality Police. They said stick to the facts. Like many ailing, ageing…
Nunc est bidendum – to Horace, the lusty rebel
Peter Stothard’s portrait of an ambitious young Lothario running wild and refusing to knuckle down is certainly not the Horace we know from Latin lessons
Time travellers’ tales: The Book of Records, by Madeleine Thien, reviewed
Sheltering from a flood in a labyrinthine ‘nothing place’, Lina opens a secret door to neighbouring rooms – where she finds three revered historical figures whose life stories she shares
‘I secreted a venom which spurted out indiscriminately’ – Muriel Spark
Frances Wilson’s mesmerising biography of one of the past century’s most singular writers is especially enlightening on the ‘domestic savagery’ often required of a great artist
The art of sexual innuendo
Paula Rego’s 2021 retrospective at Tate Britain demonstrated that, among art critics, ambiguity is still highly prized as a measure…
The anti-genius of William McGonagall, history’s worst poet
‘Not marble nor the gilded monuments of princes,’ wrote Shakespeare, ‘shall outlive this powerful rhyme.’ To be a great poet,…
Modernisation has sent Russia spinning back to the Stone Age
Howard Amos portrays a once hopeful country now sweeping the past under the carpet as it alternates between pitying itself and pitting itself against the rest of the world
The golden days of Greenwich Village
David Browne celebrates the vitality of the Village in its 1960s heyday, when clubs were subterranean crucibles where jazz, folk, blues and poetry swirled in a potent brew
What makes a good title?
Liszt’s compositions tend to have descriptive titles – ‘Wild Chase’; ‘Dreams of Love’ – whereas Chopin avoided titles. Thomas Wentworth…
Why I’m obsessed with Farming Today
Farming Today airs at an undignified hour each morning on Radio 4. On the few occasions I’ve caught it live…
I’m a fighter, not a quitter
‘Ring out the old, ring in the new…’ This was the year I discovered that one of my ancestors had…
Why 4,000 pages of T.S. Eliot’s literary criticism is not enough
Faber’s text-only, strictly chronological four-volume edition of the prose is fatally purist – though admittedly cheaper than the eight-volume Johns Hopkins version
Surviving an abusive mother-daughter relationship
In a dialogue with her younger self, the Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis tries to make sense of her traumatic upbringing at the hands of a repressive, coercive mother
Out of the depths: Dante’s Purgatorio, by Philip Terry, reviewed
Having toured the infernal campus of the University of Essex, Terry arrives at the coast, to be confronted by a strange artificial mountain which he now must climb
The triumph of surrealism
When Max Ernst was asked by an American artist to define surrealism at a New York gathering of exiles in…
