Poetry
The eternal beauty of John Clare
This has been a terrible year for horseflies. It’s bad enough if you’re human: often by the time you swat…
The poetry of pottery
For Edmund de Waal a ceramic pot has a ‘real life’ that goes beyond functionalism.This handsome book (designed by Atelier…
A rake’s progress
Philip Hensher on the scandalous 17th-century courtier whose hellfire reputation has overshadowed his fine satirical poetry
A perfect stranger
If I had to be marooned on a desert island with a stranger, that stranger would be John Burnside. Not…
McBess
My husband was surprised by quite a bit when we travelled by Underground in London the other day. Although he…
Mistakes
I enjoy Poetry Please, but was shouting mildly at the wireless the other day when a northern woman poet was…
Powerful punch lines
Vernon Scannell was a thief, a liar, a deserter, a bigamist, a fraud, an alcoholic, a woman-beater and a coward.…
The good companion
‘Goodbye to the Mezzogiorno’ was the first Auden poem that Alexander McCall Smith read in his youth. He discovered it…
Diary
The last time I wrote for The Spectator I was sitting in a prison cell. I sent the then editor…
Grand old master of modernism
How minor is minor? ‘Rings a bell’ was more or less the response of two English literature graduates, now successful…
Bare ruined choirs
I am shocked to find that William Empson, famous for his technique of close reading, was no good at reading…
Lovely, enchanting language
When John Drury, himself an Anglican divine, told James Fenton (the son of a canon of Christ Church) that he…
Dishing the dirt
Is poetry in good enough health to be made fun of in this way? The irony is that this long,…
Door into the dark
Seamus Heaney’s poetry from the other side of Northern Ireland’s divide
A novelist’s view
Do writers really need inspiring landscapes? Or the opposite?
Arab Spring
Two hundred and forty-years ago next Tuesday, Thomas Gray was buried in his mother’s grave in Stoke Poges churchyard. In…
