From the perspective of the early 1940s, Robert Graves and his co-author of "The Long Weekend", the journalist and historian Alan Hodge surveyed the darkening interwar years from 1918 to 1939 with wit, insight and a passionate curiosity about the idi...

Averno is a small crater lake in southern Italy, regarded by the Romans as the entrance to the underworld. That place gives its name to Louise Gluck's new collection: in a landscape turned irretrievably to winter it is both passageway between worlds...

Believing, as Ezra Pound did, that real emotion is all that endures, Robert Gray has avoided "magic realism", whismy, irony and mannered tone in his poetry. Instead, his style is classically direct, clear and concrete, demonstrating an Augustan prefe...

Lorna Goodison's "Goldengrove" is a rich and varied selection of poems from "Travelling Mercies" (2001) and "Controlling the Silver" (2004), together with twenty new, previously unpublished, poems. This is a gathering from a poet at the height of her...

This volume brings together two historical novels based upon the Bible. "King Jesus" is a daring rewriting of the Gospels in the light of Graves's speculations in history and mythology. His Jesus is a charismatic religious reformer dedicated to the e...

What does it mean to be fully present in a human life? How – in the face of the carnage of war, the destruction of the natural world, spiritual oversimplification and reactive fear – does one retain a capacity to be present and responsive? How far do...

Toad, Rat, Mole, Badger and the other appealing characters in "The Wind in the Willows" got their start a century ago as the stars of bedtime stories for the author's young son. Their adventures have delighted children of all generations for nearly a...

If poets were the unacknowledged keepers of a nation's soul, then an anthology of two thousand years of Scottish poets' responses to their country should offer illuminating insights into changing perspectives on Scotland throughout history. What did...

John Gallas's new book is two volumes in one. "The Coalville Divan" builds on the poet's fascination with Eastern literature which he tends to experience in Leicester and its environs, where he lives and works. These poems ponder a number of his bes...

"In The Golden Fleece" (1944), Robert Graves liberates the tale of Jason and the Argonauts from its status as a children's story and reconstitutes it as a fully fledged epic. He fills his Argo with a colourful, quarrelsome and accident-prone crew, wh...