The novelist on growing out of DH Lawrence, the joy of James Joyce and the sound of WB Yeats
July 2022
Brief letters
Sex in 1945? There was a war on
Brief letters: Drunken revelations | 77th birthdays | WB Yeats on Boris Johnson | Insanity and the Tories | Know your garden
June 2022
The forgotten ‘weird sisters’ of WB Yeats who helped forge Irish identity
Overlooked except for a scornful reference in Ulysses, Elizabeth and Lily ran a vibrant women-only arts and crafts enterprise
June 2021
Was Joe Biden trolling Britain with his choice of poetry – or choosing his words perfectly?
Zoe Williams
You can tell a lot about a leader from the poems they quote, as the president’s speech to US air force personnel proved this week
May 2021
Denis Donoghue obituary
Literary critic who defended traditional values against campus radicals
February 2021
Will bad leadership on Covid go unpunished?
Letters: Don’t blame the UK’s Covid death toll on our rule-averse culture, writes Robert Webb. Philip Clayton fears the government’s blunders will be rewarded, while Adrian Paterson traces literary references to an earlier pandemic
July 2020
Forgotten plays
Forgotten Plays: No 9 – The Words Upon the Window-Pane and Purgatory by WB Yeats
A drama in which the spirit of Jonathan Swift haunts a seance and an astonishingly brief update of the Oresteia confirm the poet’s remarkable skills as a playwright
May 2020
'Things fall apart': the apocalyptic appeal of WB Yeats's The Second Coming
Written 100 years ago, Yeats’s poem has been absorbed into the cultural bloodstream from Chinua Achebe to The Sopranos, Joan Didion to Gordon Gecko. Why is it such a touchstone in times of chaos?
December 2019
Books that made me
Thomas Keneally: ‘Does anyone write a good book at 83? Well, I think I have’
The Australian novelist on crying over a Dickens biography, laughing at Kathy Lette and the classic he is ashamed not to have read
April 2019
There are dark stirrings in Brexiteers’ sudden fixation with poetry
Edward Sugden
Geoffrey Cox et al are casting themselves as epic heroes fighting for a return to a purer past, says cultural historian Edward Sugden
Brief letters
Hadaway wi’ ya dialect confusion
Brief letters: Life before Google Maps | Stanley Kubrick’s best films | Regional dialect | Crossword | WB Yeats
Brief letters
Romance ain’t over if the fat fella sings
Brief letters: Brexit and mental health | WB Yeats | Naked protesters | James Corden | AI | Clare in the Community
March 2019
Built on violence: adapting The Remains of the Day for stage
Two lines sketched on an envelope and an obsession with WB Yeats were key to a stage version of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel
January 2019
Carol Rumens's poem of the week
Poem of the week: Why the swan by Andrew Lambeth
The writer discovers in this familiar but enigmatic creature an elusive emblem
December 2018
They’re chasing May’s leadership – but statesmanship is what we need now
Matthew d'Ancona
Our politicians are failing to rise to the challenge of finding a calm solution to the Brexit crisis in these populist times
