Marking World Poetry Day, Longleat in Wiltshire has revealed the little-known poem that shows you can find at least 32 words which rhyme with Longleat.
It was composed by Countess of Morley Frances Talbot, a published writer at the time. There was speculation that she could have been behind Jane Austen's classics when they were first published anonymously.
Aflame is an extended answer to the question Iyer asks himself of why, year after year, he still comes back “to the little cluster of huts upon the hillside.” It would be insufficient, by way of an answer, to invoke the “silence” in the book’s subtitle, for it is not obvious what the author means by the word. Certainly, he does not mean something as simple as the absence of sound. Birdsong, people shouting, even the noise of a bulldozer, he writes, are sometimes part of the silence he enjoys at the Hermitage.
It is a strange and beguiling experience to find music you have had in your head since childhood reveal new and unsuspected shades of meaning 50 years later. Beatles songs aren’t like most pop songs; instead of fading, they take on a richer colour and nuance, not least because new generations of fans inquire more deeply into what previous listeners might have overlooked or simply misunderstood. One twist of the kaleidoscope and a song we thought we knew suddenly sounds even better than it did the first 100 times we heard it.
This is the effect of reading Ian Leslie’s brilliant study of the Beatles’ music, a book that offers not only a lesson in listening (again) but an enthralling narrative of friendship, creative genius and loss.