The Latest Breaking News from WH Auden

The Rake’s Progress review – a young cast packed with promise do Stravinsky’s dance with the devil proud

The staging is awkward and balance is an issue at points, but the singers of British Youth Opera are consistently impressive

The Guardian - UK · Aug 19

A compelling biography of A.D. Hope asks us to rethink his literary legacy

I began teaching Australian literature not long after the death of Alec Derwent (A.D.) Hope (1907-2000). Despite Hope’s canonical status, I – like many – overlooked him, gravitating to writers more engaged with feminist, environmental, postcolonial and decolonial questions, or to those whose poetry was freshly modern, postmodern or experimental.…

The Conversation · May 31

Mark Gerson obituary

Photographer whose perceptive portraits of writers included well-known images of Evelyn Waugh, Doris Lessing and Faber poets of the 1960s

The Guardian - UK · May 5

Norman Page obituary

Other lives: English lecturer who was a prolific author and editor of books on writers and their literature

The Guardian - UK · Mar 18, 2025

OPINION - Woke councils should stay out of canine business

The news that Tower Hamlets is plotting to bring in new rules to insist dogs be on leads at all times has led to a twilight bark of outraged protest across the capital.

Evening Standard · Nov 21, 2024

‘We live in heavy times’: David Dimbleby on making an art show with his daughter – and why the BBC ‘lost its will’

During lockdown, the TV anchor and his artist daughter Liza expressed their fears by sending each other drawings rather than letters. As the exhibition this inspired opens, he talks about his favourite themes – war, torture, death – and why the BBC needs a full reset

The Guardian - UK · Sep 18, 2024

The Island: WH Auden and the Last of Englishness review – a deep dive into the poet’s early years

Nicholas Jenkins’s exhaustive volume – part biography, part literary study, part marathon – draws together the many influences on the young writer, from the first world war to his fascination with the lead mines of the Pennines

The Guardian - UK · Aug 18, 2024

Can’t get you out of my head: why pop culture is still under Kafka’s spell

A century on from the author’s death, the word ‘kafkaesque’ has survived wrangles over his estate, calls for its banishment and being used on the Simpsons and misused as a meme. How did it gain such a hold over culture?

The Guardian - UK · Jun 1, 2024

We should cherish handwriting: the scribbled, the scrawled, the stubbornly jotted

Our communications lose character when we give up putting pen to paper. It’s hard to imagine an Auden poem celebrating the arrival of the night email

The Guardian - UK · Jan 7, 2024

The week in classical: Jephtha; 7 Deaths of Maria Callas; Perfection, of a Kind: Britten vs Auden – review

Handel’s majestic final oratorio holds its own in Oliver Mears’s searching new production; Marina Abramović channels Maria Callas; and a well-told tale of when Britten met Auden

The Guardian - UK · Nov 11, 2023