The bard gives us advance notice of his upcoming medieval K-pop releases
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The disillusion of an upper-class Caliban
GORDON PARSONS negotiates an exhaustive biography of WH Auden that explores his growing detachment from England
THE TINTIN OF HIS ERA? WH Auden (R) and novelist Christopher Isherwood pictured at Victoria Station, 1938, en route to China. Attempting to combine reportage and art, they spent six months in 1938 visiting China amid the Sino-Japanese War, working on their book Journey to a War (1939), and subsequently emigrated to the US
GORDON PARSONS steps warily through the pessimistic world view of an influential US conservative
HENRY BELL takes issue with the assertion that basic income is a remedy for poverty when it doesn’t address the inbuilt inequality of capitalism
RON JACOBS welcomes an investigation of the murders of US leftist activists that tells the story of a solidarity movement in Chile
RITA DI SANTO surveys the smorgasbord of films on offer at this year’s festival
Reviews of A New Kind Of Wilderness, The Marching Band, Good One and Magic Farm by MARIA DUARTE, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MICHAL BONCZA
SCOTT ALSWORTH foresees the coming of the smaller, leaner, and class conscious indie studio, with art as its guiding star
The Island: WH Auden and the Last of Englishness
Nicholas Jenkins, Faber, £25
THE NEW YORK TIMES obituary of Wystan Hugh Auden in 1976 noted that “he was often called the greatest living poet of the English language.”
In one of his essays he claimed that “the only method of attacking or defending a poet is to quote him. Other kinds of criticism, whether strictly literary, or psychological or social, serve only to sharpen our appreciation or abhorrence by making us intellectually conscious of what was previously but vaguely felt.”
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