"Those who care for poetry should besiege the publisher for Sophie Hannah's first book", the "Spectator" declared. In the "Telegraph" P. J. Kavanagh wrote, "Sophie Hannah is a real star". Her broadcasts and public readings have proven extremely popul...

Lusus is the Latin word for "diversions", an appropriate title for this volume of classical poems, rooted in physical experience and in the occluded tradition of neo-Latin verse-writing, with its erotic and rural themes. The humanist allegiance in th...

Often reported to be on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize for Literature, and recently elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Bei Dao is China's pre-eminent contemporary poet. The poems in "Landscape Over Zero" reach...

Eavan Boland's new book, her first since the "Collected Poems", is in two parts. The opening sequence entitled "Colony" explores the theme of Irish language and culture. This is followed by a collection of individual poems which open out from autobio...

At the time of its birth just over a century ago, the cinema was greeted as a kind of universal language – the first one that mankind had enjoyed since the complications of Babel and their aftermath. But this universal language soon developed a speci...

"I invented jazz in 1902", said Jelly Roll Morton. He was in the right place at the right time – New Orleans at the turn of the century – so in a sense his claim is as good as anyone else's; but jazz actually evolved from a complex variety of sources...

"The Language of the Field" is an extensive, witty and authoritative dictionary. It provides etymology, definition and examples of words associated with the fauna (chased and chasers), the country lore and the implements of Field Sports – words which...

"Late" is both an elegy for and a celebration of life in our century as we approach the end of the millennium. In the spirit and style of Michael Hamburger's much-admired sequences "Variations", "Travelling" and "In Suffolk", it is a narrative medita...

Mina Loy (1882-1966) has been perplexingly absent from British literary history. In America she has been posthumously launched as the electric-age Blake, she has been translated into French and Italian to great acclaim, and in the "Times Literary Sup...

Hugh MacDiarmid (Christopher Murray Grieve) was born in 1892 at Langholm in the Scottish Borders. After training as a teacher, he worked as a journalist, before serving in France and Greece during the First World War. Returning to Scotland, he worked...