After the War, in opposition, Macmillan was one of the principal reformers of the Conservatives, and after 1951, back in government, served in several important posts before becoming Prime Minister after the Suez Crisis.
These remarkable poems are despatches from the edges of experience: from the remote coast of northern Iceland where tree-trunks and dead whales lie beached, to the furthest outposts of the Roman empire in the title poem – ‘From the very limit of the world,/Flavius sends you greetings, my lord.’ The collection is concerned with borders and brinks – the liminal spaces where distinctions blur between outer and inner, known and unknown, between what is familiar and what is other. This is the terrain of the displaced and deracinated but also the shimmering space where all is volatile, mutable, in flux – and it is also, of course, the thin, transparent veil between waking and sleep, between life and death. Shadowed by mortality, lit by lyrical grace, Words from the Wall includes poems about the killing fields of Agincourt, Flanders, Vietnam and a memorial poem to the victims of the 2015 Bataclan attack where the dead are ‘stations of flame’, and it begins and ends at the boundaries of the Roman territory, at the edge of life: ‘The girls I laughed with once/in the baths’ atrium/are withered and wattle-necked./I love them still…’
With the attentive care of an archaeologist he uncovers and examines fragments - from a personal history or the historic past - and rebuilds the narrative: a fossil in Hitler's stadium, a wedding photograph, marks on the wall where an eighteenth-century priest was shot.
Take a whirlwind tour of the Big Apple! Cheer with the roaring crowds at Yankee Stadium, chug along peacefully on the Staten Island Ferry, wonder at the bright lights of Times Square, and of course, say good night to the famous New York City skyline.
Take a whirlwind tour of the city on the Thames! Feed the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, watch the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, wonder at the bright lights of the London Eye, and of course, say good night to the stunning London skyline.
Twenty-five years on from his spectacular debut novel, Ulverton, Thorpe has produced a book that resembles and rivals it... With tremendous flair, Thorpe opens up a vista of present-day middle England. Peter Kemp Sunday Times, Books of the Year
When he finds an exquisite painting in what remains of the museum vaults, he is immediately reconnected with a lost world of beauty and order. As the narratives interweave, the story of the painting reveals the hidden story of Herr Hoffer and his three associates - and in doing so uncovers other, darker mysteries.
From an abandoned rowing boat in Estonia full of wild flowers to a swimming pool in the Congo full of drowned insects, Adam Thorpe's new collection takes us on a wide-ranging journey through states of gain and loss, alienation and belonging.
Bob Winrush was a freight dog, flying consignments of goods and sometimes people to all the corners of the world.Until, one day, he walked away from a deal that didn't smell right - something a 'freight dog' should never do.
Silbury Hill in Wiltshire has perplexed people for generations: was it part of a ritual landscape, an island, a way of remembering the dead, a place of celebration? In this acclaimed memoir Adam Thorpe returns to the landscape of his youth to explore its many meanings for him, and for us.