The World's First Author

The most popular modern food poem is probably William Carlos Williams’s ‘This Is Just to Say’, in which the speaker confesses to eating the plums his wife was saving for breakfast. Food has often been...

5 Jul 1h 23min

Andy Burnham will soon become the UK’s seventh prime minister since 2010 and will face many of the same problems that defeated his predecessors, not least the UK’s stubbornly weak economy. To dissect ...

1 Jul 1h 7min

In Wordsworth’s 1807 description of ‘golden daffodils’, the breeze animates both the scene and the inner life of the speaker. Like many poets, Wordsworth turned to the weather to mediate between inter...

28 Jun 1h 14min

‘The beautiful game has never looked more beautiful on the pitch, or more ugly off it,’ Simon Skinner writes in the latest LRB. Each World Cup seems more tainted by corruption than the last, but is th...

24 Jun 51min

Poets have always written about love, but the divorce poem is a much more recent subgenre. In this episode, Sarah and Sandeep ask if the formal processes of legal separation can be successful material...

21 Jun 1h 18min

HS2 was conceived at a cost of £37.5 billion and originally supposed to link London, Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds. It will now connect only two stations outside London and Birmingham at a projecte...

17 Jun 1h 4min

When Robert Browning was asked to become the first poet to be recorded, on an Edison wax cylinder in 1889, he forgot his own poem. In the second episode of their series, Sarah Howe and Sandeep Parmar ...

14 Jun 1h 30min

Is writing a poem work? In the first episode of their series exploring the ways in which poetry responds to our personal and collective challenges, Sarah Howe and Sandeep Parmar start by considering t...

10 Jun 1h 4min