Poetry
Why poetry matters
Juan Carlos, ex-King of Spain, behaved foolishly in relation to money and sex, and so his decision to leave Spain…
To understand the past, you need to inhabit it for a while
‘It’s no go my honey love, it’s no go my poppet; Work your hands from day to day, the winds…
From blue to pink: Looking for Eliza, by Leaf Arbuthnot, reviewed
On the way back from my daily dawn march in the park, I often pass my neighbour, a distinguished gentleman…
From Middlemarch to Mickey Mouse: a short history of The Spectator’s books and arts pages
The Spectator arts and books pages have spent 10,000 issues identifying the dominant cultural phenomena of the day and being difficult about them, says Richard Bratby
The best Christmas gift you can give yourself is to learn some poetry by heart
Every Christmas I find I am living in the past. I blame my father. He was born in 1910 —…
Remembering the genius of Clive James
‘Clive James Stirs.’ That was the standard subject line for the emails I used to get from the great Australian…
‘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…
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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…
