Essays

In 1984 I approached Philip Larkin to request permission to present an evening of his poetry read by Alan Bates. Though warned…

True. It was however right enough to make Robert Lowell one of America’s greatest poets. ‘Seeing less than others can be a…

Please let us hear no more of the tragedy of Oscar Wilde … Oscar was no tragedian. He was the superb comedian…

She once said, ‘we are driving to the interior’. One has been put on high alert. Perhaps, like ‘The Gentleman of Shalott’,…

‘The Pity of Love’ has one of the loveliest lines in poetry: ‘A pity beyond all tellingIs hid in the heart of…

‘If [when] you read my poem – you heard a voice, that would be to my liking . . . the gold…

Where is it? What is it? It’s a state of mind. It continues to induce in the reader what Cyril Connolly described…

Virginia Woolf to T. S. Eliot: ‘We’re not as good as Keats.’ T. S. Eliot to Virginia Woolf: ‘Oh yes, we are….

The English, he believed, were slow to hate. If they need a masterclass, Kipling’s their man. Seamus Heaney famously uses his pen…

On 26 March 1959 a dinner was held at the Waldorf Astoria in New York to honour, on his eighty-fifth birthday, Robert…