Adrian Barlow's blog

The Gloucestershire poet and composer Ivor Gurney (1890-1937) loved Tewkesbury for all sorts of reasons. For him, it was the place Where a c...

  What is, or was, a man or woman of letters? Does the phrase still have any meaning or value? These questions have been on my mind recently...

With time to spare the other day in Yorkshire, I dropped into my favourite independent bookshop, the one on the Grove in Ilkley. I came ou...

To Oxford, on  St Frideswide’s Day , for Christ Church Cathedral’s annual Patronal Eucharist with its traditional procession to the shrine o...

We have just returned from a week’s holiday in Paris and Versailles. Before setting off I read the second most exhilarating book I have enco...

  'I rather like being on the edge of things’, says Philip Larkin at the start of a BBC Monitor programme,   Down Cemetery Road , made i...