Colin Burrow

Catullus was a master of many kinds of oral delight. The real challenge in translating him is to capture the pleasure and the delicacy that exists alongside the frank and direct filth.

The fact that the letters of the word ‘critic’ are all present and in the correct order within ‘Christopher Ricks’ is a wonderful coincidence that might make you think that he was born, or at least baptised, to do what he does so well. However it is an arbitrary and probably uninteresting coincidence that a full anagram of ‘Christopher Ricks’ is ‘chic sport shirker’, since Ricks isn’t so far as I know famous for skiving games while sporting a Versace tracksuit.

In​ Jill Paton Walsh’s novel Goldengrove (1972), set shortly after the Second World War, the adolescent heroine, Madge, goes on holiday to Cornwall. She falls a little in love with a professor of English literature who has been blinded in action, and reads aloud to him. One of the passages he has her recite is an analysis of Donne’s ‘A Valediction: Of Weeping’:

Weep me...

Atypical poem​ in Fiona Benson’s first collection, Bright Travellers (2014), begins with a description of a hare:

              There’s a leveret in the field.I know it by its mother’s haunt at dusk,can sense the cupped space of its watch              over near the gorse.

The young hare is just a space...

‘What if?’ is the question all fiction asks. Oedipus Rex: ‘What if someone unknowingly killed his father and married his mother?’ Emma: ‘What if someone accidentally encouraged her friend to fall in love with the man she didn’t know she loved herself?’ Science fiction generally deals in larger ‘what ifs?’ about the underlying rules that...