The case for memorising verse is often dismissed as nostalgia for the bad old days of rote learning. But memory lifts poems off the page.

The American mythologist Joseph Campbell is to blame for the rise of moral relativism in the movie world — as Thomas Mann observed

Judi Dench's embattled M in Skyfall at one point reaches not for a Beretta or one of Q's exploding pens but a few lines of Tennyson. Would the words of Carol Ann Duffy work as well?

Camille Paglia's Glittering Images is a bewildering nightmare of frenzied distraction, precisely the modern condition the author hoped to combat

A new poem

A new poem