All in One Breath, John Burnside, Jonathan Cape, 2014, 96pp, £10 (paperback) Terror, Toby Martinez de las Rivas, Faber,…

  The War That Ended Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War, Margaret MacMillan, Profile Books, 2013,…

  The Dead Zoo, Ciaran Berry, The Gallery Press, 2013, 90pp, £10.50 (paperback) Echo’s Grove: Collected Translations, Derek Mahon, The…

  I Knew the Bride, Hugo Williams, Faber, 2014, 65pp, £12.99 (hardback) Hugo Williams has been called many things in…

  The Hotel Oneira, August Kleinzahler, Faber, 2013, 96pp, £12.99, (hardback) Nice Weather, Frederick Seidel, Faber, 2013, 112pp, £14.99, (hardback)…

I The rape of Sylvia Plath was the third traumatic event in her short life. Her father had died in…

  If World War I had never happened, I wouldn’t be here. My father, John Dudley Lucie-Smith, met my mother,…

Isaiah Berlin affected me like nobody else I had known; though he was not particularly handsome, I tended to react…

  This is the sixth of our series in which writers say what London has meant to them. Holly Luhning…

  Today’s younger readers approaching T. S. Eliot’s poetry for the first time are faced with two alternatives. They can…

  A water where the ebb-wave, flood-born is flood-broken yet the wave wavers and transports me through the river’s dam…

  If he truly believed in angels they would appear, I said in a dream (of whom I spoke I…

  Azzan is sounding in alleyways tonight resounding through crooked streets and empty fields of sand tonight picking the lock,…

  i Dear Ivor, no wonder you are elsewhere Than here, the park outside a parody Of your rolling Cotswold…

  A dark world, of stench and cramp, of scramble, up in the acute angle of the gable wall, the…

  A long time ago when I was young and when much of the world was still coloured red on…

  There are only a few days before we have to go home. Summer is nearly over. A flash of…