John Murray (Publishers)

ForewordI never turn to Victoria Mather s and Sue Macartney-Snape's Social Stereotypes in the Saturday Telegraph without a creeping anxiety that I might come face to face with myself. It has happened at least five times already: The English Family on Holiday, The Smug Couple from Notting Hill, The...

Everyone called him Pop Eye. Even in those days when I was a skinny thirteen-year-old I thought he probably knew about his nickname but didn't care. His eyes were too interested in what lay up ahead to notice us barefoot kids. He looked like someone who had seen or known great suffering and...

Editor's Note There is one obvious omission from the poetry selected for this book: I have not quoted from Summoned hy Bells. This blank-verse autobiographical poem is more than a hundred pages long, and is inevitably more relaxed in style than the shorter poems. I have been limited for space,...