First published in Italian in 1968, "The World Saved by Kids" was written in the aftermath of deep personal change and in the context of what Elsa Morante called the "great youth movement exploding against the funereal machinations of the organized c...

Womack gives us an essential Mayakovsky: "A Cloud In Trousers", "I Love", a film scenario, a play, agit-prop, love poetry, public and private verse. The great poet of the Soviet era remains a great enigma.

At the turn of the fifteenth century, private devotionals became a speciality of the renowned Ghent-Bruges illuminators. Wealthy patrons who commissioned work from these artists often spared no expense in the presentation of their personal prayer boo...

Forty-four years after their first publication, Edwin Morgan's versions of the great twentieth-century Russian futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky are back in print. Wi the haill voice collects twenty-five of Morgan's translations into Scots, accompanied by...

I never saw the man again, alive or dead. One will say that I saw him only for a moment, that it was misty at the time, and that even I did not recognise the features, covered as they were with grime and stubble. Yet I am sure that the taller of the...

More than sixty years after her death, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay continues to captivate new generations of readers. The twentieth-century American author was catapulted to fame after the publication of Renascence, her fi...

Curiosity has been seen through the ages as the impulse that drives our knowledge forward and the temptation that leads us toward dangerous and forbidden waters. The question "Why?" has appeared under a multiplicity of guises and in vastly different...

"Already loose sand had drifted over the stamped-down square which momentarily had distinguished the subaltern's grave: no there was no sign, no mark, no indication whatsoever. There had been, here, eleven men. Now ten rode away". In the Mesopotamian...

Towards the end of the war as the Germans are in their final retreat in November 1918, a British raiding party stumbles across a strange and eerie scene in a ruined chateau, under fire. Following the strains of a familiar tune, and understandably per...

Lauded as a "national treasure" and "world class" by his contemporaries, "Bard of Barnsley" Ian McMillan is one of Britain's well-loved poets, performers, broadcasters and entertainers. The host of The Verb, BBC Radio 3's Cabaret of The Word, McMilla...