Edmund Blunden (1896-1974) moved among the ghosts of the Great War every day of his long life, having survived the battles of Ypres and the Somme. His classic prose memoir, "Undertones of War", and his early edition of Wilfred Owen's poems were just...

This beautifully illustrated book consists of a series of encounters with writers, artists and musicians living in London, all of whom are exiles or emigres displaced from their cultural and geographical origins. The subjects include poet John Rety (...

"Sometimes I'm tempted to throw away all I've written so far and start again, write quite a different kind of book, in the first person perhaps. Or write it in the third person but like a novel, with more freedom to go where a critical study could no...

John Ashbery is known as America's foremost poet, but his prose writing and his engagement with prose writers – through translations, essays and criticism – have had a profound impact on the cultural landscape of the past half-century. This book, the...

Gottfried Benn ranks among the most significant German poets of the twentieth century. His early work, with its shockingly graphic depictions of human suffering and degradation, was associated with the Expressionist movement; the overriding theme of...

In "Parallax" Sinead Morrissey documents what is caught, and what is lost, when houses and cityscapes, servants and saboteurs ("the different people who lived in sepia") are arrested in time by photography (or poetry), subjected to the authority of a...

"The piano is not an instrument for young ladies Massimo, he said, it is an instrument for gorillas. Only a gorilla has the strength to attack the piano as it should be attacked, only a gorilla has the uninhibited energy to challenge the piano as it...

"Last Post", the fourth and final volume of Parade's End, is set on a single post-war summer's day. Valentine Wannop and Christopher Tietjens share a cottage in Sussex with Tietjens' brother and sister-in-law. Through their differing perspectives, Fo...

"A Man Could Stand Up", the third volume of "Parade's End", brings Ford's characters to the "crack across the table of History", across which lie their uncertain post-war futures. Divided into three parts, the novel is a kaleidoscopic vision of socie...

"No more Hope, no more Glory, no more parades for you and me any more. Nor for the country... Nor for the world, I dare say...", says Christopher Tietjens to a war-damaged fellow officer, under fire on the Western Front. "No More Parades" continues "...