The Romantic generation of poets and thinkers, schoolchildren are often told, took a dim view of science. Like a lot of blunt instruments, this received wisdom is not without its uses. Wordsworth's witty and much-cited line, "We murder to dissect", pretty much sums up the bias: try too hard to understand, say, how a frog works, and all you'll end up with is a nasty, smelly mess of slop, bones [...]

To adapt one of the poet's own ways of classi fying persons and things and, indeed, God Himself: W H Auden could be terribly boring, but he was absolutely not a bore - not in print, anyway, even if anyone who survived one of his vodka-sodden social evenings in New York might well want to pass a less lenient verdict. On the right occasions, Auden was not only not a [...]

There are children, so rumour has it, who feast their growing imaginations on the likes of Jemima Puddle-duck and Peter Rabbit, Ratty, Mole and Toad from Wind in the Willows, Alice and the Mad Hatter and the Cheshire Cat, on tales of Narnia and the Wouldbegoods, hobbits and Moomins. And then there are the kids who have read none of the above but who sit, jaws agape, over the exploits [...]

As the title of Colin Grant's gripping and sympathetic biography spells out, the chap in the chapeau is Marcus Mosiah Garvey (1887-1940): Jamaican-born printer, publisher, editor, poet, orator, political theorist, sometime director of a commercial line of passenger ships, key prophet of the Back to Africa movement and, in the eyes of some, reincarnation of John the Baptist. There is no call for squeamishness about using the term "Negro" when [...]

One of the most tenacious sentimental myths about the lives of artists is a variant of the Ugly Duckling tale: unappreciated, starving, even persecuted in his or her lifetime, the lonely genius is vindicated after death and universally hailed as a genius. Van Gogh is a classic case of the posthumous swan, as is Kafka, as is Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, as is Keats - Keats being a particular favourite: the most [...]