Grey Gowrie 
A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney by Martin Gayford
Like his contemporary and fellow Yorkshireman, Alan Bennett, whom he slightly resembles physically, David Hockney has been loved and admired throughout his lifetime. He painted one of his greatest works,… Read more
Undoing the folded lie
by , , , ISBN When you buy this book (and buy you should for reasons that follow), try reading the notes to A New Waste Land before the poem… Read more
Bells to St Wystan
This week sees the centenary of the birth in York of W. H. Auden. All over the world this season, Audenites should at 1755 hours precisely prepare a very cold,… Read more
The higher slopes of Parnassus
The Gallery Press, Loughcrew, Oldcastle, Co. Meath, Ireland, www.gallerypress.com ‘August for the people and their favourite islands,’ wrote W. H. Auden in a poem from his early Marxist phase. This… Read more
The sensuous recluse
What in the world has happened to the culture of France? If you enter a room almost anywhere in the West when two or three of the arterati are gathered… Read more
A celebration with a warning
Geoffrey Hill publishes books in verse rather than collections of poems. This is admirable but presents a reviewer with problems. You want to recommend him more or less unconditionally as… Read more
Zimmerman bound or unbound?
What is going on here? What on earth is going on here? Christopher Ricks, the world’s leading critic of poetry in English, Frank Kermode and the American Helen Vendler his… Read more
For the union dead
‘When I die,’ Robert Lowell told me, three days before he did die, in 1977, at the age of 60, ‘Elizabeth’s shares will rise and mine will fall. But mine… Read more
Grand, ritzy and splendid
A consolation of being an international foot-in-the-door man in the 1970s, albeit one selling Monets and Moores, not Hoovers, was arriving from JFK at the Hotel Carlyle in Manhattan. You… Read more
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