Rupert Brooke

Interviewed on television for his 80th birthday in 1959, E.M. Forster said that one of the reasons he was so fond of King’s College, Cambridge, where he had lived as a Fellow since 1946, was ‘a very precious tradition, that the old people and the young can meet here very easily and without self-consciousness’. In this svelte and sprightly book, Simon Goldhill (himself a Fellow of King’s) traces this tradition over some 140 years, and describes the part it played in the creation of a remarkable, ever evolving community of gay men. He begins his story in 1885 when J.K. Stephen, the future tutor to Queen Victoria’s grandson Prince Albert

Andrew Motion has previously published a memoir of childhood, In the Blood (2006), but this new book focuses on his becoming a poet, his search for mentors and subsequent writing life. Motion, a country boy, has a Words-worthian bent, and talks about the pull of evocative recollections, already hardening when he entered adulthood, as ‘equivalent to the songs of the Sirens’, explicitly ‘spots of time’. He is, as one might expect, good on poetry’s general appeal – ‘ it prizes compression and distillation in a world of deliquescence’ – and perceptive on the root cause of its lure for him. The appeal of ‘falling in love with a dead man’