W.h. auden

The novelistic tube or nozzle through which experience is squeezed in order to be bletted on the page in words, and in turn create the illusion of experience in the reader, is a slender one. Novelists have often perversely focused on the narrowest of lives. Xavier de Maistre wrote an entire travelogue in the 1790s about 42 days spent in his room, while Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s debut novel in 1985 was about a character refusing to leave his bathroom.  Should undertakers ever have suntans? And when does ‘mummy’ become ‘mum’ as a form of address? These spectacular exercises in technique present a parallel to what has always been the case, the

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’

As I’ve occasionally come to think is the case with The Spectator, this book is perhaps best begun at the back. Otherwise it might be taken for niche history – applied historical moral philosophy, say, or an aspect of ‘the people’s war’ usually overshadowed by the manifest imperative to defeat the unparalleled evil of Nazism. That evil, concludes Tobias Kelly, professor of political and legal anthropology at Edinburgh, has indeed ‘become the frame through which we seem to assess all evils’; but ‘the spectre of appeasement has also reared its head too often’. As a result, ‘we have been quick to get carried away with the virtue of war when

The purpose of Lara Feigel’s book is to describe the ‘political mission of reconciliation and restoration’ in the devastated cities of Germany after 1945 (though no politicians were directly involved). The chief needs of the shattered population at the time were, of course, practical: food, water, sanitation and the reconstruction of buildings. But a vital supplementary effort was made to address what was left of German culture and history after the crimes and falsifications of the Nazis. The idea was that the arts should revive an alternative, peaceful and civilised way of life in the ruins of the country. It is surprising that no mention is made of the reform

‘I cannot say there is no vanity in making this funeral oration of myself, but I hope it is not a misplaced one,’ wrote David Hume on the eve of his death in 1776, under the title, ‘My Own Life’. It is with this same title that, accepting the inevitable progression of metastatic cancer in his liver at the age of 81, Oliver Sacks paid tribute to his favourite philosopher. Like Hume, the charge of vanity was not unfamiliar to Sacks when writing about his achievements and the shapes of his inner life. In a way rare for a doctor, Sacks was prepared to admit that vanity is part of

‘Goodbye to the Mezzogiorno’ was the first Auden poem that Alexander McCall Smith read in his youth. He discovered it in an anthology, and it puzzled him because he had not then visited Italy. A little later, Smith found Auden’s elegy to Sigmund Freud, and was enthralled by its promise that psychoanalysis frees people ‘to approach the future as a friend/ without a wardrobe of excuses, without/ a set mask of rectitude or an/ embarrassing over-familiar gesture.’ When Smith began his careful, systematic reading of Auden while living under civil war conditions in Belfast, he found the hostility, menace and anxiety of Auden’s pre-1939 poems attuned to his environment. The