Stephen Spender
‘I’ve taken to sleeping in my teeth’ – the wartime admissions of T.S. Eliot
‘I’m getting to be a wambling old codger’…‘I haven’t got enough phlegm to undress’, writes the poet, exhausted by readings and broadcasts, in letters spanning 1942-44
Can W.H. Auden be called a war poet?
Though Auden maintained that the Great War had little effect on him, its catastrophe haunts his early poetry and shaped his anxiety about what it meant to be English
‘He couldn’t help being a bit surreal’
Love him or loathe him, Lucian Freud was a maverick genius whose life from the off was as singular as…
Putting Germany together again
The purpose of Lara Feigel’s book is to describe the ‘political mission of reconciliation and restoration’ in the devastated cities…
The swastika was always in plain sight
Ordinary Germans under the Third Reich did have wills of their own, argues Dominic Green. Most actively embraced Nazi ideology, and were aware of the extermination of the Jews. As the war worsened for them, what did they think they were fighting for?
There will be blood
Siena’s Palio is steeped in violence, bribery and corruption. But it matters to its people more than anything, says Jasper Rees
The frog prince
It would not have surprised their friends in the 1930s when Peter Watson had a fling with my grandfather, Robert…
