T.S. Eliot
Charles Williams: sadist or Rosicrucian saint?
Charles Williams was a bad writer, but a very interesting one. Most famous bad writers have to settle, like Sidney…
Lines of beauty
David Jones (1895–1974) was a remarkable figure: artist and poet, he was a great original in both disciplines. His was…
Time out of mind
There can hardly be two novelists less alike than Sebastian Faulks and Will Self, in style and in content. Faulks…
Reducing poetry to a science
Is it possible to tell a good poem from a bad one? To put the question another way: are there…
The same old song
T.S. Eliot liked to recall the time he was recognised by his London taxi driver. Surprised, he told the cabbie…
The making of a famous serious poet
T.S. Eliot may have put much of his early life into his poetry, says Daniel Swift, but The Waste Land remains a marvellous mystery that defies explanation
Marx men
Ian Thomson celebrates the anarchic genius of Groucho and his brothers
From dram shop to Queen Mother’s handbag
Gin Glorious Gin: How Mother’s Ruin Became the Spirit of London is a jaunty and diverting history of ‘a wonderful…
Doing the Woburn Walk
The Bloomsbury of the title refers to the place, not the group. The group didn’t have a poet. ‘I would…
The maiden aunt of modernism
Marianne Moore’s poems are notoriously ‘difficult’ but her personality and the circumstances of her life are as fascinating today as…
