Shelley

‘The politics of Paul Foot are an extraordinary mixture of first-class reporting, primitive Marxism, family wit and fantasy.’ This judgment is taken from a review of Foot’s first book, The Politics of Harold Wilson (1968). The reviewer was well placed to assess it, and, according to this biography, he ‘tore the book apart’. As well as being an MP, he was Paul’s uncle, Michael Foot. Born in 1937, Paul Foot came from a political family. His grandfather, Isaac, and his eldest uncle, Dingle, were both Liberal MPs; his father, Hugh, was a distinguished diplomat who, as Lord Caradon, would become a foreign office minister; and his uncle Michael became a

Much like its editors, I have no idea who Poetry for the Many is for. However, the choir it preaches to is quickly identified. It opens with a dedication to Julian Assange, the free speech martyr in no way a narcissist patsy for a hostile state. A member of UB40 summarises the book’s aim on the jacket: to ‘encourage the working classes to embrace and enjoy culture’. Elsewhere, in the course of four separate introductions, I divine some plan to make poetry both politically relevant and accessible to the lower orders. This project apparently requires the literary advocacy of Len McCluskey and Jeremy Corbyn. They have written personal introductions to

William Boyd taps into the classical novel tradition with this sweeping tale of one man’s century-spanning life, even to the extent of providing the accustomed framing device: the chance discovery of a cache of papers and mementoes. The items listed by ‘WB’ in his ‘Author’s Note’ – a musket ball, a fragment of a Greek amphora, a crinkly lock of hair – all find their place in the tale of this 19th-century adventurer, lover, traveller and author. Cashel Greville Ross (his name turns out to be as mutable as his identity and nationality) is born in Ireland in irregular circumstances – so irregular that a swift flight to England as

Shelley, walking as a boy through his ‘starlight wood’, looking for ghosts and filled with ‘hopes of high talk with the departed dead’, found nothing in reply. Nothing reverberated. The ghosts were silent. But he felt something else non-human: the springtime breezes bringing a sense of the marvellousness of life itself. And so in that instant (or so he says) his mind changed. No more seeking after gothic horrors or pining for the worst; no more listening to the dead. Instead, ‘the spirit of beauty’ descended on him, illuminated him, shaping his life, becoming his goddess, the only force he could imagine that ‘could free/ This world from its dark

Tennyson’s poem ‘Mariana’ has gone everywhere in the world since 1830. A professional scholar in Uruguay, Papua New Guinea or New Haven, Connecticut, reading the lines ‘Weeded and worn the ancient thatch/Upon the lonely moated grange’ might want to ask a few questions. Do English houses ever have moats? (Yes — Ightham Mote and Madresfield Court are famous examples.) Can we find houses with a humble thatch and also a moat? (A harder question – Tennyson’s poem set a vogue in landscape design as well as poetry.) Or, taking a different tack, where does the use of the word ‘moat’ as a verb come from? (Easy — ‘moated grange’ is