Poetry
The lady in the caravan
Towards the end of a long relationship – ‘resolved to have a conversation about the Future, which meant Separating’ –…
Flashes of brilliance
Funny old life, eh? Small world, etc. In one of those curious, Alan Bennett-y, believe-it-or-not-but-I-once-delivered-meat-to-the mother-in-law-of-T.S.-Eliot-type coincidences, it turns out…
Shelley addict
Last week I heard the actor Julian Sands give a virtuoso performance of work by Percy Bysshe Shelley to mark…
The wild, wide fen
‘To talk about Crabbe is to talk about England,’ E.M. Forster declared in a radio broadcast in May 1941, but…
Letters
Russian misrule Sir: Your editorial (‘Sanction Schroder’, 21 May) laments that western sanctions may be harming ordinary Russians, given that…
Will the world forsake him?
Cracks are beginning to appear in T.S. Eliot’s once unassailable reputation, says Philip Hensher
It pierces the heart
Terence Davies’s Benediction is a biopic of the first world war poet Siegfried Sassoon told with great feeling and tenderness.…
Poetry in motion
Craig Raine on the challenges of translating poets’ lives and work to the screen
A pure original
John Donne sounds like nobody else, and his poems invite us to feel that we might know him, says Daniel Swift
Bono’s ‘poem’ was an insult to the craft of verse
‘Poet’, said Robert Frost, ‘is a praise-word’. So it is. That explains in part the unabashed delight with which Colm…
This be the curse
Philip Larkin’s big problem
The making of a poet
Charles Causley was a poet’s poet. Both Ted Hughes and Philip Larkin considered him the finest candidate for the laureateship,…
Poet’s notebook
Living, as Clive James put it, under a life sentence, and having refused chemotherapy, I find I respond to the…
The National is the graveyard of talent
Somewhere in the wilds of England a stately home is collapsing. Rising floodwaters threaten the foundations. Storms break over the…
I adore haikus
They got me through the past year
A mysterious muse
If you were to glance only briefly at the title of the Irish poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s prose debut you…
Testing times
In London, the weather is a gentle sashaying mockery. An Indian summer reminds us of the sullen apology of summer…
Men and sheds
The interview podcast is a genre immoderately drawn to gimmicks, as the logical space of possible formats is gradually exhausted.…
Diary
For obvious reasons, stocks in ex-editors of The Spectator are experiencing an all-time low. But my own complaint is with…
Lashings of irony
Sam Riviere has established himself as a seriously good poet who doesn’t take himself too seriously: his first collection, 81…
Et in Orcadia ego
Maggie Fergusson on the reclusive poet George Mackay Brown
Alarm bells
The pitfalls of choosing a wedding reading
Nature calls
‘Georgics’ are an ancient form of poetry about agriculture and the land. The term derives from Greek gê ‘land’ +…
Putting on a brave face
San Francisco is a fantastic place… it’s terribly sunny… I am having a splendid hedonistic time here… I find myself…
Low life
‘Willie or bum?’ I said to Catriona on the motorway. Everything in my recent medical career has been introduced via…
