An introduction to the life and times of this great genius, and to the London he endured, loved and greatly influenced. Your host is Christopher West.

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

Telegraph View The NHS is wasting £13700 on a sex guide for pensioners.

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

An estate of undistinguished suburban houses that inspired Sir John Betjeman is to be given special heritage protection to stop it being destroyed by developers.

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

An introduction to the life and times of this great genius, and to the London he endured, loved and greatly influenced. Your host is Christopher West.

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

The widow of TS Eliot has backed a campaign to protect a Margate seaside shelter where the poet wrote much of The Waste Land.

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

Gordon Brown has sought advice from Sir Andrew Motion the former poet laureate prompting speculation that the Prime Minister was seeking inspiration for his speeches.

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

Of all the First World War poets, Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) is not only the most accessible but also the most pivotal, illustrating changing attitudes to the war as it unfolded.

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

FORMER poet laureate Andrew Motion will be at Farringford, Freshwater, next week.

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

A host of stars have been lined up for a TV adaptation of much-loved children’s book The Gruffalo.

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

The newly knighted poet, Andrew Motion, has held off from commenting on the Derek Walcott/Ruth Padel/Oxford Professor of Poetry debacle, but is finally ready to express his views to “The Independent”.

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

Edward Neil was a brilliant, incisive and brave literary critic. He taught at various academic institutions, including the Open University, Chelsea College, and latterly at Middlesex University where he was Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Cultural Studies. He wrote many articles for a variety of distinguished publications, and was never afraid to expose the fads and fashions …

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

Literary history could have been dramatically different if some classics had been published under their working titles I’ve been rereading The Great Gatsby, discovering new things on every page and marvelling anew at Fitzgerald’s brilliantly compressed prose-poetry. It’s always astonishing to find that this wonderful novel is scarcely 60,000 words long. But would we think the same of Gatsby if, …

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

Former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion has been knighted in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List.

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

A proposed addition to Charles Dickens Primary School in Lant Street has gone on show at the Royal Academy of Arts.

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

George Orwell isn’t usually thought of as an art critic. The author of 1984 is rightly remembered as one of the great political journalists and witnesses of the 20th century. But his contribution to the literature of modern art is also worth celebrating.

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

Minnesota’s Largest Sid Dickens Retail Store Announces Addition of Seven New Sid Dickens Memory Tiles

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

A guided walk with John Constable through the back-streets of The Borough, from the Marshalsea Prison to ‘Nancy’s Steps’, exploring Charles Dickens’ childhood encounter with the Victorian underworld.

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

If Land of the Lost doesn’t deliver last rites to the TV series adaptation genre, it won’t be for lack of effort.

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

The BBC tried to take the author George Orwell off air because his voice was “unattractive” according to archive documents released by the corporation.

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

George Orwell’s prowess as a writer and political thinker made him one of the most prominent left-wing activists of his day, but documents released today by the BBC show that his voice was so eccentric that moves were made to keep him off the air.

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia announced that Broadway’s Hugh Panaro will play pickpocket wrangler Fagin in its 2009 holiday season production of Lionel Bart’s Oliver!

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

Charles Dickens’ timeless classic A Christmas Carol has be remade by Disney.

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

Seamus Heaney has suggested that the net be cast wider to find a new Professor of Poetry at Oxford University following Ruth Padel’s resignation to consider a poet who writes in another language.

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

Jane Austen may have fallen for a clergyman while she was on holiday in Devon, a literary historian claims.

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

CANNES, France (Hollywood Reporter) – Danish filmmaker Ole Bornedal will write and direct an adaptation of Dean Koontz and #39;s thriller “The Husband.”

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

In 1946 Observer editor David Astor lent George Orwell a remote Scottish farmhouse in which to write his new book, Nineteen Eighty-Four. It became one of the most significant novels of the 20th century. Here, Robert McCrum tells the compelling story of Orwell’s torturous stay on the island where the author, close to death and beset by creative demons, was engaged in a feverish race to finish the …

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

A charles Dickens theme park has slashed its opening hours after being hit by the credit crunch.

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

While all eyes are on Carol Ann Duffy his intriguing successor as Poet Laureate Andrew Motion has quietly been composing five sonnets about climate change which will be set to music by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies the Master of the Queen’s Music.

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

IT’S the economy, stupid. After a decade as poet laureate celebrating royal weddings and birthdays, Andrew Motion has “dashed off” a final piece of verse as a critical response to Britain’s financial woes.

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

The automobile has improved in many ways since Henry Ford trotted out the first Model T’s 100 years ago. Fuel economy, howeve…

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

He’s a nice lad,” said Philip Larkin of Andrew Motion, “but I think not really tough enough – in his writing, that is. Probably,” he added, in what may or may not have been a compliment, “tough enough otherwise.” Well, if the young man who later became Larkin’s biographer was “tough”, it was clearly just as well. You need to be tough to be appointed poet laureate and have other poets denounce …

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

Cranford the BBC’s popular costume drama has helped to save the house where Elizabeth Gaskell wrote the novel on which it was based.

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

Having scored an unexpected hit with his literary mash-up ?Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,? the writer Seth Grahame-Smith will take at least two more stabs at combining period drama and horror, Publishers Weekly reported. Mr. Grahame-Smith is currently No. 3 on The New York Times?s paperback trade fiction best-seller list with ?Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? (Quirk Books), which combines Jane …

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney has backed 76yearold outsider Geoffrey Hill to be the next Poet Laureate.

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

Why judging people on class will lead to wrong conclusions

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies ‘mash-up’ becomes unexpected bestseller The public’s unanticipated desire for the unusual conflation of Regency romance and the undead this morning sent Seth Grahame-Smith’s zombie mash-up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies soaring to the top of Amazon’s UK “movers and shakers” chart, which monitors the books which are experiencing sudden demand from consumers. …

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

The president of Mexico received one of the more unusual gifts given by the Queen during an incoming state visit today a copy of the classic dystopian novel 1984.

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us

TS Eliot refused to publish Animal Farm by George Orwell because of its “Trotskyite” politics it has been claimed.

Classpress.net Updates | Permalink | Add to del.icio.us