Daisy Dunn

An author speaks out against social censorship: The Reith Lectures reviewed

Plus: a haunting new dramatisation of Auden's The Age of Anxiety on Radio 3

We are witnessing an ‘epidemic’ of self-censorship, which is ‘wilfully blind to its own tyranny’ and positively disastrous for creativity: author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie delivers one of this year's BBC Reith Lectures. Photo: BBC / Richard Ansett 
issue 03 December 2022

‘The Age of Anxiety’, W. H. Auden’s book-length poem, has always been described as strange, and difficult. It is an eclogue, but set far from the countryside, in a bar in New York, in the middle of the second world war. It looks like a modern script on the page but metrically it sounds more like Old English.

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