It is also a book about England and Englishness and, in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, one of deep interest and relevance.Ī Shropshire Lad was published, after what Housman described as a period of “continuous excitement”, in 1896, when the author was a 36-year-old classics professor at University College London. The biographer and critic Peter Parker’s elegant and absorbing Housman Country is less a formal biography than a book about legacy and about how one writer’s work, specifically A Shropshire Lad, has resonated or “vibrated” through the decades, acquiring new meaning and relevance for each subsequent generation. For this is a godless pastoral and the only constant in these poems, for all the pleasures of their lyric intensity and ironic refinement, is death. The setting is rural Shropshire, in deepest, faraway England, but “heartless, witless” nature does not console or redeem, even as it beguiles and tantalises. In this poetry of fond remembrance and painful loss, young men - “lads”, Housman called them - invariably die prematurely or are betrayed in love.
Read more Nostalgia, poetry and the spirit of England Aug/ Financial TimesĪE Housman has been dismissed as a minor poet and he is not currently on the school curriculum, but to read A Shropshire Lad, a cycle of 63 short interlinked poems, for the first time is, I think, to encounter one of the strangest, saddest and most affecting works in English literature. How it all went wrong for Labour’s best and brightest Read more The fall of the golden generation Septem/ New Statesman Richard Beard seeks to uncover the truth behind a long-ago family tragedy Corbyn, Orwell and the spirit of England Read more The Labour Reckoning J/ New Statesman What happened next would reverberate around the world. It was approaching midnight on a warm bank holiday weekend towards the end of August. The three men had been drinking for several hours by the time they arrived at The Stow shopping centre in Harlow. How the World Cup and Gareth Southgate’s young, diverse team reawakened a sense of progressive English nationalism Read more England Rising J/ New Statesman Not since Conrad had a novelist so completely absorbed himself in the shifting complexities of his age, or written more sharply about the dark places of the world. Read more VS Naipaul: The king of literary rootlessness Aug/ New Statesman Read more Mark Hollis: The Sound of Silence Febru/ New Statesman It is of vital importance to determine what England is before deciding what role England can play in the huge events that are happening Read more The English Question Novem/ New Statesman
#Shattered union lp how to
Read more How to be different and better February 2020 / New Statesman The possibility of post-traumatic growth Read more Covid-19 and Mortality Salience Ap/ New Statesman Read more An English Elegy J/ New Statesman Marcus Rashford, Raheem Sterling and the rise of the activist super-player Read more Political Football J/ New Statesman Its message is as relevant as ever, says the New Statesman editor in a new introduction to the seminal book. Orwell wrote Animal Farm at a time of global crisis as a warning about oppressive state power.
Read more George Orwell: The Road to Revolution Decem/ Macmilln Publishers
In the end, the great spy novelist remained an enigma even to himself. John le Carré: The Secret Life Decem/ Salt Publishing (republished New Statesman)