Shortlisted for the 2017 Ledbury Forte Poetry Prize For Second Collections. Sometime during the twentieth century, the self-mythology of the literary critic fused with that of the cowboy: lone outriders practising a defunct trade. In Holy Toldedo! John Clegg tracks the critic's silhouette over the dangerous, sun-drenched landscapes of New Mexico, California, Nashville, Utah, Oxford, Cambridge, and London. Here is Donald Davie listening to gospel radio in a Nashville taxi, and here...

The Teller, volume 2, is a continuation of the story of survival in what we call, the Early Iron Age, made all the more desperate by the fact two potentially hostile tribes now occupied the same coveted swathe of territory, actually the rich, rolling farmlands north of the river Severn.

The Teller is a tale set in the late Bronze Age, told by an itinerant storyteller to members of an Iron Age tribe living on a defended hilltop c 405 BC in the region now known as the Welsh Marches. It describes survival during worsening weather and how they sustained themselves on what little was available. Apart from when luxuries such as meat, fish, wheat, barley and peas, were obtainable, the rest of their diet was barely nourishing, similar to what would now be described as foraging fa...

Sometime during the twentieth century, the self-mythology of the literary critic fused with that of the cowboy: lone outriders practising a defunct trade. In Holy Toledo! John Clegg tracks the critic's silhouette over the dangerous, sundrenched landscapes of New Mexico, California, Nashville, Utah, Oxford, Cambridge, and London. Here is Donald Davie listening to gospel radio in a Nashville taxi, and here is F.R. Leavis standing on a chair, 'unscrewing instead the world from round the light...

The book describes how a character, starting with virtually no money and absolutely no knowledge of antiques, managed to learn and bit by bit, claw his way up the trade echelon to finally run a massive antique shop on the Welsh Marches. The tale includes door knocking escapades, the odd romantic dalliance, chanced successes, embarrassing failures, the antique ring, local gypsies, the Irish travellers, a court case and even a house clearance in Australia. It is related by a contemporary aut...

The chemist with a sample analyses an aliquot of that sample, a part of a part of a larger whole. The title of John Clegg's new collection speaks to the poems' sense of being parts of larger wholes, themselves parts of a larger whole... The scientific knowledge and the sometimes old-fashioned diction that abound in these poems are both part of worlds of reference in which sequencing (narrative, historical, scientific) is crucial and revelatory, as in the series of poems 'A Gene Sequence' w...

Invention and innovation are not the same. When we come up with an exciting and original new idea, by itself that idea is not an innovation. It is simply an invention, possibly a great invention, but at that point the hard work is still to be done. Innovation is that hard work.It is the process of turning that idea into something of value. In fact, innovation doesn’t necessarily need a great new idea to get it started. It is often nothing more than the recombination of existing ide...

Invention and innovation are not the same. When we come up with an exciting and original new idea, by itself that idea is not an innovation. It is simply an invention, possibly a great invention, but at that point the hard work is still to be done. Innovation is that hard work. It is the process of turning that idea into something of value. In fact, innovation doesn’t necessarily need a great new idea to get it started. It is often nothing more than the recombination of existing ideas that...

This selection of Middleton's letters offers a new beginning point for readers of this dazzling, many-talented writer. The first letter here dates from 1936, the last from 2015, and this selection charts a life lived to the full as the poet reports on his work, his writing life and his continuous transatlantic engagement with the poets and critics of his generation.Enthusiastic, discursive and slyly humorous, Christopher Middleton (1926–2015) was an electrifying correspondent. This...

C.H. Sisson called John Heath-Stubbs 'a Johnsonian presence with a Miltonic disability' – a reference to the poet's blindness. This selection of an abundant poet restores him to a new readership with the work on which his popularity was based. His ground-breaking early poetry is given its due, especially the major long poem Wounded Thammuz, printed here in its entirety. Heath-Stubbs was at the centre of the New Romantic school. The Second World War left him as almost the sole repr...

"His Last Bow" is one of 56 short stories about Sherlock Holmes by the renowned author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Set on the eve of the First World War, a German agent by the name of Bork is getting ready to leave England with a vast collection of intelligence...

This edited collection provides unprecedented insight into the emerging field of multilingual education in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Multilingual education is claimed to have many benefits, amongst which are that it can improve both content and language learning, especially for learners who may have low ability in the medium of instruction and are consequently struggling to learn. The book represents a range of Sub-Saharan school contexts and describes how multilingual strategies have been...