LEO BOIX recommends a film that portrays how fascism feeds on ignorance, machismo and myth in isolated communities abandoned by the state
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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
[National Media Museum from UK/CC]
Chris Searle speaks to Syrian/French flautist NAISSAM JALAL
With thousands of AI‑written, edited or ‘polished’ books being sold, LAURA BEERS hears an eerie echo of Orwell’s ‘novel‑writing machines’
ANDY HEDGECOCK is entertained by a playful novel that embeds a fictional game at its heart
Death comes for Liberals, entitled murder, Vatican hit squads, and fraternising with the Blitz killer
New releases from Public Image Ltd, William Basinski, and John Luther Adams
GABRIELE NEHER draws attention to an astoundingly skilled Flemish painter who defied the notion that women cannot paint like men
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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