Following on the explorations of culture and politics in his previous collection "The Good European", the writings in "Zest" delve into less obvious but important aspects of social life―into manual work and "dolce far niente", into ancient vernacular...

In this pithy abecedarium, doctor and poet Iain Bamforth takes a close look at the conflict of values embodied in what we call medicine – never entirely a science and no longer quite the art it used to be. Bamforth brings his wide experience of medic...

In "The Crossing Fee" Iain Bamforth re-stages the odyssey of the legendary German hero who falls into a lake in the Black Forest and emerges in the China Sea. Circulating between Europe, the Philippines and Indonesia (where Bamforth worked for five y...

Nietzsche, warning his countrymen in the Bismarck era against the nationalism that sought to promote all that was anti-rational in the German tradition, exhorted them to be "good Europeans", avatars of the enlightened economic man of the eighteenth-c...

"So he stood in his shoes And he wondered, He wondered, He stood in his Shoes and he wondered" – John Keats Written under the sign of Eros, builder and destroyer of cities, and prefaced by an epigraph from Keats, the poems in "A Place in the World"...

Iain Bamforth's third collection applies carnival licence to various kinds of histories: personal, symbolic, ethnographic, social – even to a history of representations in the 101 epigrams and "autographemes" which make up the Paris sequence "Impedim...