Poetry

The Iliad begins with a grudge and ends with a funeral. In between are passages, if not necessarily of boredom, to alter the war adage, of lists, pathos, sex, humour, fairytale strangeness (golden fembots, a talking horse) and lyric images, punctuated by moments of pure terror (eyes popped out of heads, a spear throbbing in a beating heart, a man cradling his intestines in his hands). With several new translations in the past year alone, as well as a film in 2004, and recent novels (David Malouf’s Ransom), dramatisations, and book-length poems (War Music by Christopher Logue and Memorial by Alice Oswald), we are clearly, in our era of seemingly

Being a Beast is an impassioned and proselytising work of philosophy based on a spectacular approach to nature writing. That genre has given us riches on the language of landscape, the redemptive power of goshawks and the lives of fields, rooks, butterflies et al. We are wealthier for the movement, but in none of many beautiful books will you find a passage like this, from a writer in a wood at dusk thinking about badgers. It would be pointless to reel off the adjectives and metaphors I used to describe to myself the scent of shepherd’s purse on the pillow or dog’s mercury in the wood. That might say something

Reading Daisy Dunn’s ambitious first book, a biography of the salty (in more ways than one) Roman poet Catullus, it struck me how lucky we are: only one copy of his collection of poems survived the ages, hidden under a bushel in Verona. Catullus might have gone the way of his contemporaries, such as Cinna, whose lynching is immortalised in Julius Caesar, and whose poems are now dust. Happily, we have Catullus’s small, polished oeuvre, varied and ravishing: there are squibs, lambasting his fellow Romans (‘The father has the filthier right hand/ But the son’s anus is the more voracious’); fascinating mini-epics traversing all of Greek myth; beautiful marriage hymns;

‘I am 12 miles from a lemon,’ lamented that bon vivant clergyman Sydney Smith on reaching one country posting. He was related to Gerard Manley Hopkins, a priest who, in the popular imagination, would quite possibly balk at the offer of a lemon. After all, 30 years before Prufrock, Hopkins did not dare to eat a peach, fearful of its delicious savour when offered one by Robert Bridges in a Roehampton garden. Hopkins was a complex man who delighted in simple things. Our sense of his view of the world has been complicated by the circumstances of his publication. Forbidden to publish his great ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, he

When Hugh and Mirabel Cecil’s book In Search of Rex Whistler was published in 2012, the late Brian Sewell reviewed it with typical insight and lack of generosity. Despite recognising the artist as an extraordinary talent and perhaps the inventor of neo-romanticism, he regretted that Whistler would never be taken sufficiently seriously and pronounced it the last book on him. Happily the Cecils have now proved Sewell wrong several times over. Hugh Cecil’s father, David, was a close friend of the artist, and these volumes seem in part to constitute the continuation of a family’s love for a man who inspired affection wherever he went. Along with a recent book

The row over Jonathan Bate’s unauthorised Life of Ted Hughes is hotting up. Professor Bate originally embarked on the book with the blessing of the Hughes estate, but that blessing – along with permission to quote from the poet’s writings – was withdrawn. Now the Hughes estate has issued a press release claiming to have identified a number of errors in the book – 18 in an 16 page sample – and requesting that the book be corrected and an apology made to Carol Hughes. You can read it below. The estate say that they have not yet had a response from Professor Bate or his publishers. I’ve emailed him

In Testaments Betrayed, Milan Kundera says: ‘Biographers know nothing about the intimate sex lives of their own wives, but they think they know all about Stendhal’s or Faulkner’s.’ In The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Janet Malcolm says: ‘The transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged, but it is the only explanation for biography’s status as a popular genre.’ She also shrewdly remarks on the ‘mantle of judiciousness’ that biographers are forced to deploy. Jonathan Bate informs us that over a period of five years he has read and taken notes on nearly 100,000 pages of Ted Hughes manuscripts. He piously tells us at the end of his

‘Elms at the end of twilight are very interesting,’ wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins in his journal: ‘Against the sky they make crisp scattered pinches of soot.’ P.J. Kavanagh, who has died aged 84, plucked out this observation for one of the columns that he wrote for The Spectator between 1983 and 1996. He was right to call a volume collecting these Life and Letters columns (with a later series from the TLS) by the name A Kind of Journal, for they possess the kind of narrative impetus that makes classic diaries such as Woodforde’s or Kilvert’s so compelling. But they were also a poet’s work-books, just as living in rural

In the preface to his great collection of essays The Dyer’s Hand, W.H. Auden claimed: ‘I prefer a critic’s notebooks to his treatises.’ Auden’s criticism is like that: a passage of insights instead of a single sustained argument, and the same is true of Samuel Johnson, whose works are a pleasure to read for the feeling of the pressure of a great mind at play. Clive James belongs in this company. His new book Latest Readings is a kind of reading diary: a collection of short essays, each prompted by one book or a handful he happens to be reading. They are not in any logical order or sequence, but