Society

‘Not marble nor the gilded monuments of princes,’ wrote Shakespeare, ‘shall outlive this powerful rhyme.’ To be a great poet, as the Stratford man knew, is to be immortal. But there’s another way to achieve immortality through verse – and that is the route taken by William McGonagall, the ‘worst poet in history’, who was born 200 years ago this month. His star, I’m pleased to say, shows no sign of fading. He has, as is only proper, an adjective. You can be Keatsian, Eliotian, Homeric. Or, like most of us when we sit down to write a poem, you can be McGonagallesque. His name is so much a byword

Reading Melissa Lawford’s excellent analysis in the Sunday Telegraph, ‘Putin can’t afford peace – Russia’s economy is hooked on war’, I had a queasy sense of recognition. Lawford claims that Vladimir Putin has no real desire for a peace deal in Ukraine, because both his personal political power and his country’s militarised economy depend on the conflict. She quotes an IMF former chief economist as saying: ‘He’s enjoying the war. It’s awful. But he doesn’t want to end the war.’ Doing the podcast rounds in London during the past week, I’ve felt a sheepish kinship with Vladimir. Have I, too, been enjoying the war? The culture war, that is. If

When my old school, Presentation College, Reading, was demolished a decade ago, the Labour council desperately searched for famous old boys after whom they could name streets on the housing estate that replaced it. This was a challenge. According to the local newspaper, ‘names rejected include one in recognition of Mike Oldfield, the musician behind ground-breaking prog rock album Tubular Bells’ – rejected by Oldfield, I assume, since he hated the school. They settled on Bowden Row, ‘in honour of political philosopher and Presentation alumnus Jonathan Bowden’. I wonder if the residents of the handsome semi-detached houses know anything about Bowden. The council didn’t. He was a former cultural officer