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Andrew Marvell's To His Coy Mistress
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Views | Duration | ||
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1. My family's love of books | 6 | 1802 | 01:54 |
2. Spring-cleaning with granny | 1 | 506 | 02:34 |
3. Sex and Marie Stopes | 522 | 03:38 | |
4. Granny used to read aloud to us | 1 | 333 | 01:06 |
5. Our favourite books when we were young | 338 | 01:52 | |
6. Home schooling in the 1920s | 308 | 04:55 | |
7. Getting into Oxford | 460 | 02:44 | |
8. Oscar Wilde | 467 | 00:45 | |
9. Meeting a 'pansy' | 522 | 01:23 | |
10. Poetry and seduction | 386 | 00:41 |
I knew pretty all the poems, of course, in the Oxford Book of English Verse, and things. And the ones I liked were the love poems, always. And, 'Had we but world enough and time'… I liked them really better than any of the modern poetry I knew, but I did… I remember I did love Stephen Spender's poems, which were very easy to understand, and which did sort of express things that worried me. I mean, 'We who live under the shadow of a war', one of them said. And anyway, it was about things that one was worried about and which one understood.
Diana Athill (1917-2019) was a British literary editor whose publishing career began when she helped André Deutsch establish his company. She worked with many notable writers, namely Philip Roth, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Rhys and VS Naipaul. Following the publication of her memoirs, she came to be hailed as an author in her own right.
Title: Poetry and seduction
Listeners: Christopher Sykes
Christopher Sykes is a London-based television producer and director who has made a number of documentary films for BBC TV, Channel 4 and PBS.
Tags: Oxford Book of English Verse, Stephen Spender
Duration: 41 seconds
Date story recorded: January 2008
Date story went live: 23 December 2008