THE JOSEPHINE HART POETRY HOUR

The chance to chant out Kipling's "The Mary Gloster" was the highlight of the Bermudan guide's day. The time was Easter 1990. The Berlin Wall was well down.

Saddam Hussein was well up. Margaret Thatcher, also on her way down though not yet knowing it, had just arrived for an Atlantic summit with George Bush the elder. "I've paid for your sickest fancies; I've humoured your crackedest whim", the local tour leader declaimed to a desultory band of hangers-on. "Dick, it's your daddy, dying; you've got to listen to him!"

And so we journalists did listen. An impromptu performance of a poem, whatever the reason for it, was a break from impenetrable political briefs. There were helicopters in the unusually grey sky and flash-pasts by American and British fighter planes. Up on the Hamilton hill, the then President Bush had no choice but to endure his usual dose of "backbone stiffeners" from the Iron Lady. Down in Pitt's Bay Road, a foreign correspondent could forget for an hour the first follies of the New World Order -and be entertained.

The purpose of the guide's performance was to re-enact for visitors a local tourist scene, famous in "Happy Island" Bermuda, in which the elderly Mark Twain used to read aloud at his holiday home from the works of his favourite poet.

Rudyard Kipling's ballad, "The Mary Gloster", in which a self-made shipping tycoon on his deathbed ("'Not the least of our merchant princes'. Dickie, that's me, your dad") confronts his spendthrift art-loving "Harrer and Trinity College" son, was a special favourite of Twain's. Our Summit poetry reader proclaimed the lines outside Twain's house in sonorous black-preacher style, with rolling waves of admiration for Kipling's hero, the helpless financial pioneer with his devastated hopes of passing on his passions to his heir. The knowledge that only a mile or so away a weakening Mrs Thatcher was out to handbag "Gentleman George" added frisson to this portrayal of Sir Anthony Gloster, hardman, realist, chancer, a disappointed millionaire obsessed in his last hours only with being buried at sea on the same Macassar Straits coordinates as his wife.

"And they asked me how I did it; and I gave them the Scripture text, / 'You keep your light so shining a little in front o' the next!' / They copied all they could follow, but they couldn't copy my mind / And I left 'em sweating and stealing, a year and a half behind." We could all imagine the British Prime Minister enjoying that. According to the guidebook, Twain had regularly reclined, white-serge suited on his hotel bed, and read this poem aloud to old male friends and the young female admirers whom he called "Angelfish". By the end ("Never seen death yet, Dickie? . . .Well, now is your time to learn!") there were said to have been open tears from the women and stern blinking from the men. It was all in that "drawling, resonant voice": the sound that Twain uniquely brought to American literature was lent at these times to the poet of Empire.

Among our own tour band of Pitt's Bay Road there was generous appreciation but no flowing tears that day. This was not one of those poetry readings, all too common, which make one cry out for escape. But it was not quite a pleasure either. To imitate one great writer reading the words of another is not a role for an amateur. Both the place and the time were appropriate enough for Kipling -a colonial island when one way of the world was passing into another. But our journalists' eyes were on impending newspaper deadlines for the latest thoughts about Europe without Communism and the Middle East without the Cold War. Unlike Twain's early twentieth-century guests, we did not even get the whole poem, still less "the bare hotel room, its pine woodwork and pine furniture, the loose windows which rattled in the sea wind", all of which the guidebook described. While Twain's listeners had heard "once in a while a gust of asthmatic music from the spiritless orchestra downstairs" we had constant helicopters and staff cars. While Twain was said to have "hair which gleamed and glistened like frost in the light of gas jets", our jets were F 16s.

Yet a poetry reading still defeated the political "read-outs" for a place in this reporter's memory. Fourteen years later, I could still recall more of this poem on the troubles of success than the press conference on the same theme that eventually followed. Once again there was a small group of journalists, different ones but the same sort of folk, listening to the same story of the bitter "Baronite" whose son, instead of following him into ships and steel, had "muddled with books and pictures, an' china an' etchin's an' fans" and whose "rooms at college was beastly, more like a whore's than a man's". We were in the British Library; and as well as the newspaper folk there was a big crowd of poetry-fanciers, gathered to hear a selection of Kipling's works, this time read by a professional, the film actor and once so familiar James Bond, Sir Roger Moore.

Sir Roger had been invited by London's doyenne of poetry impresarios, the novelist Josephine Hart. There was the excitement of expectation that night in 2004 and even the slightest sniff of old Bermuda in the air, in the blond, bare wood library walls and furniture, in the mixture of the raffish and respectable, rich and not-so-rich, Angelfish and older males -as well as in the person of 007. A blond woman beside me at the bar ordered a Martini, "shaken not stirred". Money was meeting art with a joke. But there was a bit of apprehension too. How would the star and the poet get on? The British Library drinks supply had quickly proved unsatisfactory in the Martini department. When Sir Roger walked out on stage, he seemed stiffer than we like our celluloid heroes to be.

Josephine Hart has been offering up this sort of occasion, this sort of surprise, since 1987. Whatever poem you have ever heard read before, and wherever you have heard it, never miss a chance to hear it again with her. In a city where any night you can find a living poet and his or her own work, she gives the dead poets some society. Amid all the debates about whether public readings are a good thing, and, if so, who should be the readers and, if there must be readers, how they should read, she has put her faith in the versatility of actors. She began at an art gallery in Cork Street, tried Shaftesbury Avenue theatres, and is now ensconced in St Pancras. She follows no theory. Her sense of what works on her stages allows huge variation of style -and a constant supply of surprises.

Not even the most regular attender ever knows quite what will come next. One night Edward Fox, who holds the whole text of the Four Quartets in his head, incanted Eliot's words as a stream of mystic song, like metrical joss sticks. On the same night Dame Eileen Atkins read her Eliot from a book and persuaded like a philosopher, a Santayana on stage. Simon Callow has created countless brief lives for Hart in his own magic way -like the watcher at the beginning of Herbert Read's "My Company" in a celebration of First World War poets: "A man of mine / lies on the wire; / and he will rot / and first his lips / the worms will eat".

In June this year Bob Geldof had his rock star's pick of early Yeats -"The silver apples of the moon, / The golden apples of the sun". That night there were fans in the Library, more musical than poetical, who stepped out into the square and hummed the Judy Collins version. When Geldof crouched forward in his chair beside fellow readers Sinead Cusack and Rupert Graves, his short sleeves were dragged almost to his elbows: "I have spread my dreams under your feet; / Tread softly because you tread on my dreams". The Boomtown Rat and campaigner for Africa luxuriated in the familiarity.

Just as some in the audience might have thought this was too "celeb", the mood changed again. Out came Cusack, the most classical and versatile of Hart's regular performers, with "The Circus Animals' Desertion": "Now that my ladder's gone, / I must lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart". Relevance to events outside the hall is not what much of the audience is seeking. But it is a secret pleasure of Hart's Poetry Hours when the Now grabs at the Then -the ideals of Africa at those of Ireland, the Asian Tsunami at Eliot's river gods.

The night for Yeats was only days before Live8. Geldof arrived in front of the Library's giant statue of Isaac Newton with what seemed like twin ice-creams in front of his mouth, microphones through which he was barking at distant obstacles to his plans. When he began "The Pity of Love", we knew we should resist linking the two: but, as he intoned the words, not so much more subtly than that Bermuda guide ("The pity beyond all telling / Is hid in the heart of love; / The folk who are buying and selling, / The clouds on their journey above"), many did connect them, however quietly.

Hart has an acute understanding of what actors can do. She has shown it in her novels: Oblivion, which followed the better known Damage and Sin in 1995, contains a rhetorically gruesome scene in which a director sets out his skills before a documentary-making journalist, showing how he fires up his stars into "giving life to the dead". And she shows it in these monthly readings whose new season begins on September 28. Each one always opens with an acknowledgement to her performers, who give their services without charge, to the British Library, which charges as little as it can, and to the Bloomberg Company which is filming the performances for a DVD which she wants to send to every school. This initial cameo, and a succinct, witty setting of the poems' context by the dark-haired presenter with the Irish passion and the radio-mike on her lapel, is the ritual, dependable part of these evenings. After that, everything is between the poet and the actor - Ralph Fiennes and Auden, Harold Pinter and Larkin, Brian Cox and that object of Sir Anthony Gloster's contempt, Oscar Wilde.

There is not much she has not tried. She once admitted to worries about an earlier ballad about a man's obsession with his wife, Browning's "Andrea del Sarto". But on that occasion Robert Hardy did the business in triumph. The more frequent your attendance, the less you can predict how the words will fall. The coming season includes Dominic West on Auden, Ian McDiarmid with more Eliot and an American evening of Lowell and Frost.

How did Sir Roger Moore succeed with the dying shipowner and his yearning that his son, Dickie, he of those "sickest fancies", should sink a father's dead body in the South Seas? It would be fair to report that the film star came on stage to a quiet reception. In the audience there were careful men, as big in business as the ballad's hero, those who began by "patching and coaling on credit, and living the Lord knew how, / We started the Red Ox freighters -we've eight-and-thirty now".

There was a somewhat higher proportion of "Harrer and Trinity College" aesthetes, a charge laid subtly by Kipling against his cousin Stanley Baldwin. There were politicians of our own day: Hart is married to the Tory peer and key maker of Mrs Thatcher's Conservative Party, Lord Saatchi. And there were the ticket-buyers who had paid their money to see their 007 -but were somewhat hushed to see him in person.

Did even Mark Twain, with even his most admiring band of Angelfish, bring tears flowing so widely and so fast? I doubt it. Moore did not use any actor's accent, not the regional burr which the poet himself used to read his character parts. He used no grand gesture. He did not have Mark Twain's pipe -nor the 1990 Bermudan's preaching roll. He was stiff. He almost ladled the words, regularly, without fuss, with a minimum effort that was almost frightening -as well as fertile for tears.

"For the heart it shall go with the treasure -go down to the sea in ships. / I'm sick of the hired women. I'll kiss my girl on her lips! / I'll be content with my fountain. I'll drink from my own well, / And the wife of my youth shall charm me - an' the rest can go to Hell!" Every line was like taking a light blow from a boxer. And by the end there were bruises on many minds. When the next season starts (details at www.josephinehart.com), do not expect anything exactly like that. Do expect something equally unexpected.

EVENING STANDARD
13 Aug 05
MELANIE MCDONAGH

Josephine Hart is rather more than the wife of Maurice Saatchi. He may be the cofounder of one of England's most successful advertising companies, but she is a noted novelist (Damage was made into a film by Louis Malle), has produced three West End plays, was a director of Haymarket Publishing and is a Booker Prize judge.
Now she's engaged in a new endeavour, to get Brits to share her pleasure in their own poetic tradition. She's a proselytiser for great poets. Last year, she started a series of poetry readings at the British Library which turned the lost art of reading poems aloud into one of London's most brilliant, and
– with tickets at £5 and £7.50 each – cheapest, nights out. There was Roger Moore reading Kipling; Edna O'Brien and Yeats; Edward Fox and TS Eliot; Ralph Fiennes and Auden. 'I want to excite people about language… to help people fall in love with the trinity of sound and sense and sensibility,' says
Josephine Hart. The readings resume in September, each preceded by a ten-minute summary by Josephine herself about the evening's poet and his work. 'I do a tremendous amount of research,' she says.
She came to London in the Sixties at the age of 22 from Mullingar, a town in Co Westmeath, Ireland, which is practically a byword for provincialism, where her father owned a garage. She married Maurice – or 'M' as she calls him –in
1984. Maurice, who Josephine describes as 'a really sweet guy', was until recently co-chairman of the Tory Party (he charged the Tories £1.5 million for the ads for this year's election campaign), as well as running his advertising company with his brother Charles, husband of Nigella Lawson. But
the glory days of Thatcherism were the finest hour of the Saatchi brothers' company, when Maurice and Charles helped propel Margaret Thatcher to political power ('Labour Isn't Working', was their celebrated 1979 campaign).
'They were just so young when they started,' says Josephine. 'And the business met this amazing political movement. It was unbelievably exciting.' Indeed, she knows Margaret Thatcher well. Did she advise Maurice about
politics and advertising back then? She laughs. 'Marriage is a long conversation, and our conversation ranged over everything… my shoes, my hair,the children, Ireland, how Maurice can't stand Connemara and yes, work and
politics. You can give your opinion, but whether your advice is followed is another matter.' She is emphatic in her opinions, but then, as she says,'I'm just intense about everything.' Even in repose, she conveys an impressionof energy. She's attractive and engaging. As for her age, she says cheerfully
that she is 'somewhere between middle age and death', but if you were to guess her chronological age – as opposed to her inner youth – at 60, you probably wouldn't be far off.
When we meet, she's just about to set off for France, dressed in her trademark black, relieved with a little white. She's carefully, but undramatically, groomed.
While she has the clear, emphatic diction of an educated Irishwoman of her generation – and the same facility for quoting poetry from memory –occasionally she adopts the modern habit of raising her pitch at the end of a sentence, turning statements into questions. When it comes to having her photograph taken, she grimaces. 'I hate it with a passion I can't tell you,' she says unexpectedly. 'I'm anything but vain, with very good reason.' Her marriage to Maurice Saatchi, 59, is plainly her bedrock. 'Maurice is an intellectual,' she says proudly, 'and, I think, a very interesting intellectual. We have marvellous conversations. It's a 25-year obsession. It's never eased off, I'm afraid. We still love having dinner or lunch together.' In theory, they don't have much in
common.As she says, 'We both come from tribal backgrounds. I come from a tribal Irish Catholic background, he comes from a tribal Jewish background, but we've never taken that on.' Also, he's a Conservative, while she's at home with actors and literary types and has to struggle to decide if she is a Conservative or not. 'I would say that I'm a very, very leftwing Tory, if there is such a thing,' she says eventually. But none of the differences matter. He gets on brilliantly with her
radical thespian friends like Harold Pinter.
'Maurice is just the most relaxed, easy, funny person in the world,' she says affectionately. 'He and Harold Pinter get on like a house on fire.' As for the religious differences, 'Maurice's Jewishness is so non-there as faras I'm concerned,' she says.
None of the family is religious, he never goes to the synagogue, I never even think of him like that.' For her part, she gave up on Catholicism years ago, though she says, 'My mother used to infuriate me by giving this sweet little smile at me and saying, "You'll come back."' He is, in fact, her second husband – she has a son, Adam, 30, by her first marriage to a fellowdirector of Haymarket, Paul Buckley, which lasted seven years, and another, Edward, now 20, with Maurice. They came together when they worked at Haymarket (Maurice was in charge of new products). It was initially an
affair, with Josephine soon leaving Paul for Maurice. Her second marriage was, she says, not a problem for her Catholic mother: 'She loved Maurice very much.' And certainly, the couple have all the pleasures of wealth. The flat in the West End is big, light and decorated with understated taste. Her
small drawing-cum-TV room is all white, including the wildly impractical, soft, deep carpet. 'I don't know what came over me,' she says cheerfully. 'I thought, "We're postchildren. Why not?" I'm old enough now for a white carpet. I think I'm entitled to it. But I must say that Maurice and I are careful when we're drinking red wine.' As for the most famous member of the Saatchi family, Maurice's sister-in-law, Nigella Lawson, she is carefullynoncommittal. 'I've known Nigella many, many years,' she says. 'And I knew John [Diamond, Nigella's first husband]. She's extraordinarily beautiful.'Almost all the readers for the poetry evenings come from her wide social circle. Harold Pinter, for instance, read Larkin for her. 'I adore him,'
she says.
'He's passionate about the things he feels strongly about, and he's a seriously great actor. He was totally a pet. A gem of the first order. He did Aubade [Larkin's reflections on mortality] at the end. Harold had been ill,so Aubade was close to the bone. He did it perfectly.' Some of the poetry
preferences of her friends took her by surprise. 'I rang Bob [Geldof] about Byron,' she says, 'It was so sweet, on his mobile… why he lets people through on his mobile I don't know… and said, "Is this a bad time to call?" and he
said, "I'm in the middle of a sandstorm in the Sahara but it's not a bad time." And I said, "Will you read Byron for me?" and he said, "No, I can't stand the man. I'm a Keats man myself." So I said, "Right, I'll hold you to that."' She did, too. Sir Bob read Keats' poems to a packed audience earlier this year, to triumphant effect. 'As always with Bob,' she says with satisfaction, 'there's nothing casual at all. He read Keats so
heartbreakingly, people were stunned.' He did a Yeats reading, too, with Sinead Cusack. 'Bob has suffered, as we know, and when he did the Yeats love poems the other night – you know The Folly of Being Comforted? – well, most of the audience were in tears.' None of the famous people who give up their
evenings to read poems make money from it; neither does she. 'They're all keen to do it,' she says. 'They do it because of the project – to get it into schools.' A book of eight of the poets in the series, with an introduction on each written by her and a CD of the readings, is being published next year,and she is raising £300,000 to have a copy sent into every school that
wants one. She's talking to Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York, to see whether he'll put the readings on DVD for schools.

Her mission is to help contemporary youth express themselves by teaching them poetry. 'It's a tragedy that children no longer recite poetry,' she says.
'It's an absolute tragedy. If you don't learn poetry at a time when it'sso easy, when will you? If children get a feeling for the power of language, I think that would transform communication.' People's feelings about poetry are extraordinarily personal. 'Many people dislike Byron,' she says. 'I think it's because he's cruel. I find his cruelty thrilling. Some people loathe Auden, and they loathe him, I think, politically. It's quite surprising, the number of very serious people who are friends of mine who feel that way.' And fashions in poetry change. One of the most successful poetry evenings was
devoted to, of all people, Rudyard Kipling, although at the start she had to warn people that the word 'nigger' cropped up in one poem, The Ladies. 'I got
Roger Moore on that,' she says. 'Oh, we were packed.
And it's not just that it was Roger Moore, though he was wonderful. He's stunning-looking and 75 and lethally funny. He did all the funny ones, then he came to the savage stuff, Epitaphs of the War, and it was breathtaking…
that's why I think Kipling is going to last. He is a political writer.
The humour is terrific, but actually he is a man of huge anger. He is the most angry poet I've ever come across. I was so surprised at the number of people who I'd have regarded as absolutely loathing Kipling who came up and said, "Kipling… I am so pleased he's coming back."' Her own education in
poetry began with the nuns in Carrickmacross primary school. 'We did wonderful things. We did Walter de la Mare, Gerald Manley Hopkins.' In secondary school, there was Yeats, Auden and Eliot. She doesn't go back to her home town after her mother's death: 'I think I'd be too upset. I don't think I'd recognise Ireland now.' Undeniably, though, being Irish was a
real asset in London society. 'It's a hugely advantageous identity,' she says shrewdly. What's more, at a time when every other convent-educated Catholic in London will bore on about being terrorised by nuns, the atheist
Josephine says flatly that the nuns who taught her were 'fantastic… you will never get
teachers like them again'.
Ted Hughes was a friend, and he introduced his daughter Frieda to Josephine in the hope they'd get on.When she held a reading of Sylvia Plath's poetry, she invited Frieda.
'She was thrilled,' she said. Musing about Plath, she says, 'In the poetry,Sylvia dived into the depths to write. She went into the abyss. And she really didn't come out.' Has Josephine Hart ever gone into the abyss? After all, one of her brothers died of pneumonia when she was a little girl, and a sister and a brother died within months of each other (the sister of meningitis,the brother in an accident) when she was in her teens. She is unexpectedly silent for a moment, twisting the chunky ring on her finger. 'I think I have, at one stage in my life… it sounds a very strange thing to say… I was really
young, 17, and I had to look at life really hard and say, "OK, I will continue to live…"' Perhaps it is this that makes her own novels so dark. Even the titles are bleak: Damage, Sin, Oblivion. 'What interests me is where people break
themselves… the testing point. And that's what I see the books as, moral stories. The man in Damage breaks himself on an erotic obsession, which is completely different from lust. In Sin, she's destroyed through envy. In Oblivion, which is the most horrendously difficult book to read, it's grief…
I've always thought that grief is a moral arena because I think when terrible
catastrophe or tragedy enters into a family, their decision to continue with life is the hardest moral decision they will ever make, with huge repercussions for everyone around them.' Has poetry changed her, I ask.
'Changed me?' she repeats. 'It's made me.'

Thomas Leuchtenmueller
Sunday November 28 2004
The Observer
Josephine Hart Poetry Hour British Library, London WC1

Since Adam and Eve were kicked out of Eden, many publications have captured the ambiguous character of the garden: its beauty and dark, seductive power. So what could be better than to have a reading of garden-inspired poems? Well-known actors read the works and a splendid time is guaranteed for all.

Which is exactly what happened when Charlotte Rampling, Claire Bloom, Harriet Walter and Dominic West enchanted their audience in the packed British Library. The evening was prepared and hosted by writer Josephine Hart who, for the last two years, has been hosting poetry readings in the West End and now hosts them at the library.

When trained voices present masterpieces such as Yeats's 'Down by the Sally Gardens', Eliot's 'A Dedication to my Wife' or Keats' 'Ode to a Nightingale', you understand why the garden is a synonym for love and longing, death and destruction.

Every garden mirrors its owner and marvellous poems about these special places encourage us to save a planet that was once a paradise.

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited

Poetry, Aristotle believed, was 'more philosophical and of higher value than history." Josephine Hart would probably agree. She discusses the subject with a fervour which, given her lilting Irish accent, you might more readily associate with religious faith. She certainly speaks with the passion that you would expect from the author of Damage.

"Poetry is profoundly important", she says. "And yes, it does have a power that is connected with that of religion. It is part of a search for truth.

"Take Byron: 'And if I should meet thee/ After long years,/ How should I greet thee? - / With silence and tears'. I think that is a line that is so heartbreaking and so true of that real grief that is utterly silent. I believe that poetry can offer a greater insight into life than any other art form.

"Or think of Eliot: 'the awareness/ Of things ill done and done to others' harm/ Which once you took for exercise of virtue.' I think that is as harsh a moral judgment as you could make on yourself. There's so much that you do in life that you convince yourself you did for the very best reasons. But one of the 'gifts reserved for age', and one of the prices that you pay for it too, is that (unless you are a fool) you will see the ambivalence of your past actions. Poetry offers an understanding of the truth of life that helps us to live it."

This, Hart says, is the main reason why for the past 20 years she has organized and promoted poetry readings. Drawing on a circle of literary and theatrical friends and acquaintances - Edward Fox, Ralph Fiennes, to name but two - she matches readers with poets for recitations that, intercut with brief commentaries that Hart prepares and delivers herself (and lasting no more than an hour - "that's not daunting, anyone could listen to anything for an hour"), explore the visions of our greatest poets.

I went a few weeks ago to hear Harold Pinter reading from the work of Philip Larkin in the British Library. Pinter's grave, deep voice accumulated in that room. And slowly listeners shared in the common experience that Larkin's poems capture and so perfectly distil. Often they smiled. But the reading ended with Aubade, a stark, un-illusioned meditation upon the inevitable: "Being brave/ Lets no one off the grave," writes Larkin. "Death is no different whined at than withstood."

"It was a risk", says Hart, and one she almost didn't take. But then this is the woman who dared to take the Lyric in Shaftsbury Avenue for an evening of Eliot. " You are going to lose all your money," she was warned. But when she still went ahead, she had poetry lovers all but brawling at the box office for tickets.

At the Larkin reading, the lacerating candour of the final poem sounded with the spare clarity of a full stop. I filed out, echoes sounding in my head like the wind down an empty mine shaft. I felt sliced to the bone.

"Poetry is a journey into the feeling and the life of the world", says Hart. "And it's not that I'm obsessed with young people or anything, but if the next generation doesn't know the work of the great writers, if it doesn't understand it, then how is poetry going to get passed on?"

Our times need poetry more than any other, Hart believes. "Today's view of life can be so cruel," she says. But so often we are fed what is merely fashionable or modish. "For me, about the least interesting thing in literature is capturing the Zeitgeist." She cites G.K. Chesterton: "I will not submit to the arrogant oligarchy of those who simply happen to be walking around."

More than image-conscious contemporary culture, Hart suggests, we need people who have gone before us, who can point us out a way. "Poetry gives you a philosophy to hold onto. But it also gives great pleasure, enormous joy. The ecstatic, too, is best exposed in poetry. Think of Yeats and of his feelings of physical love at its most glorious - 'so great a sweetness flows that I shake from head to foot', he wrote. Imagine that commitment to a love that could outlast everything.

"I often think of Auden: 'In headaches and in worry/ Vaguely life leaks away/ And time will have his fancy/ Tomorrow or today…'" That is why poetry is so important, Hart says. "It is there so that you will not let your life just leak away."

Dame Eileen Atkins, Sir John Mortimer and others will read from Byron at the British Library, May 12, 6.30pm. For tickets, call 020-7412-7222

Rudyard Kipling is a writer for our times, and for all time, says Roger Moore

I first heard Rudyard Kipling's name when I was about eight. My parents had taken me to the West End of London to see a movie called Captains Courageous with Spencer Tracy - a great treat. The film is one of those children's coming-of-age tales: the pampered teenage son of an American millionaire is swept from an ocean liner off the coast of Massachusetts. After being rescued by fishermen, the boy is forced to work for his keep on a trawler. The film - based on Kipling's 1897 novel - was the first big-budget production to use a Kipling story.

Captains Courageous is a bit like The Jungle Book - a child must adjust to a tough life without his parents' help and grows up in the process. All of which was wonderful for an eight-year-old boy. I loved it - even more when I learnt that Kipling had been brought up in India, as were some of my family. He was born in 1865 in Bombay and later worked as a journalist in Lahore. My mother was also born in India and was brought up in Calcutta in a barracks; my grandfather served in the Boer War and was a sergeant in India before going on to be a senior regimental sergeant-major in the First World War. Thus Kipling became a heroic writer for me.

When, recently, the novelist Josephine Hart asked me to read poetry at the British Library in London, I was nervous. Initially, she didn't say what what I'd be doing and I'd not done much poetry reading. So when I was told I could do Kipling, I was relieved. People of my age know their Kipling from school. If is one that sticks with me because I was required to learn it as a test piece for my English literature exam. It remains tremendous advice:

If you can dream - and not make dreams

your master,

If you can think - and not make thoughts

your aim . . .

I was often singled out to read poetry in school lessons. Fortunately, most of Kipling's poetry works well read aloud, especially since much of it is in monologue. I remember reading If to my own children. I don't know whether they were impressed, but they're still talking to me. One of the strengths of Kipling is that he captures accurately scenes and particular periods. I can't think of anyone who portrays 19th-century India quite so well or describes the point of view of the common soldier so precisely, as in Tommy, one of the poems I'm reading at the British Library:

For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck

him out the brute!"

But it's "Saviour of 'is country" when the guns

begin to shoot

That's very telling of the times and remains so. One of my favourites, Danny Deever - about young recruits watching fearfully as one of their comrades is hanged for murder - is also a highly compelling, journalistic piece. It describes a whole world in a few words. Frank Sinatra once told me what he considered the secret of performing. He treated every song, every ballad he sang as a separate play, a play in its entirety. That is what Kipling did in Danny Deever and most of his work.

Kipling has many critics. In the 70 years since he died, the literary establishment has been unstinting in its sneering - probably mainly because he is popular. As they say: those who can, do, those who can't, teach, and those who can do neither become critics. Let them sneer. The politically correct - words I hate - will always revile him. Admittedly, Kipling uses phrases that are far from politically correct. But, when he was alive, such words were commonly used. They were not, I think, written in deliberate bigotry.

Alf Garnett from the 1960s television comedy Till Death Us Do Part would have loved Kipling. Johnny Speight, who wrote the show, was very left-wing, which was why he drew Garnett as this appallingly racist character. But because it was comedy, the sympathy went to Garnett; you felt sorry for such an ignorant, right-wing man. I once had dinner with Speight and asked if he worried about all the stick he was getting from Till Death Us Do Part. He said the whole object of Garnett using racist language was to defuse the words, to render them meaningless.

I'm also reading The Ladies. It's a great monologue, but, like Garnett, highly politically incorrect. In the poem, a soldier boasts about the women he's slept with around the Empire:

I've taken my fun where I've found it;

I've rogued an' I've ranged in my time

Anyone listening to this now must accept that it was the way people spoke at the time, especially these lines:

An' I took with a shiny she-devil,

The wife of a nigger at Mhow;

'Taught me the gypsy-folks' bolee;

Kind o' volcano she were,

For she knifed me one night 'cause I wished she was white, And I learned about women from 'er!

I don't think that by reporting it Kipling was condoning such bigotry.

Despite the sneering, Kipling is probably the most quoted of all English authors. So many expressions he coined are used every day, such as "East is East and West is West," and "The female of the species is more deadly than the male". One of my favourites is: "A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke."

The most familiar criticisms of Kipling are that he is tub-thumping, Blimpish, jingoistic and imperialist. To some extent he was all these things, but he is more complex. He has a greater understanding of Englishness than he's credited with.

There's that wonderful line, "But the English - ah, the English! - they are quite a race apart" from The Puzzler. It pokes fun at the inscrutable way his countrymen behave - only occasionally saying what they really mean and then probably in obscure public school slang:

Yes, sometimes in a smoking room, through clouds of "Ers" and "Ums",

Obliquely and by inference, illumination comes,

On some step that they have taken, or some action they approve -

Embellished with the argot of the Upper Fourth

Kipling is having a bash at the English Establishment there - which is probably why former pupils of the Upper Fourth Remove, or at least those who became literary critics, got annoyed with him.

It is true that Kipling was a committed propagandist during the First World War, in which his son was killed. But the verse he wrote after the conflict is as angry as anything by Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon. In The Children, he says:

That flesh we nursed from the first in all cleanness was given

To corruption unveiled and assailed by the malice of Heaven

In Epitaphs of the War, Kipling writes these words for the fallen:

If any question why we died,

Tell them because our fathers lied.

The sentiments expressed here are quite the reverse of the jingoistic image painted by those critics. That is why I like Kipling.

Josephine hart, the novelist, grew up an 'Irish word child'. She explains how her ardour has drawn leading actors to take part, unpaid, in monthly poetry evenings

Life was language before it was anything else. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" - this was probably the first line of pure poetry I ever hear. It remains, even to my aetheist mind, perfect.

"Poetry" wrote C. Day Lewis, "began in religion." Certainly religious sounds entranced me, well before their meaning was apparent. "Kyrie eleison/ Christe eleison" and "Eli, Eli, lama sabacthani?" made me swoon. Perhaps I comprehended their "emotional equivalent", a phrase of T.S. Eliot's I discovered years ago. All I know is that when I learned that "Eli, Eli.. " translated into "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?", sound and sense and sensibility unified, becoming a mysterious trinity within which, I believed, I would find a key to understanding life. I was right.

I became a word child, an Irish word child. I quickly learnt that my native country practised a literary hierarchical system of Orwellian precision - novels good, plays better, poetry best. Were not the signatories of the Irish Declaration of Independence poets? "Novelists", I'm afraid, does not have quite the same ring. History made English the language, which we lived. And though the many sins committed by its original practitioners were mournfully recited, their poetry was taught with passion. Poets were the gods of language. I've sometimes wondered, had Ulysses been a poem, whether Joyce would have had so much trouble - witness the amused toleration of The Midnight court (a traditional poem in which the women of Ireland bemoaned, in some detail, the libidinal inadequacies of the men), and the acceptance of Yeats's deeply erotic Leda and the Swan - but I digress. The words of the godpoet should, like admonitions from the catechism, be known by heart. Get the line wrong and the ruler came down on one's outstretched, trembling palm. Contempt for a line over which a poet may have agonised demonstrated a carelessness bordering on the reckless. The moral implications were clear: a girl who played around with Mr Yeats's god-give genius was capable of falling very far indeed.
By the age of 12 every girl in my class could recite at least one Shakespeare sonnet, a number of Yeats's poems, some carefully selected Eliot and Auden, at least one verse of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Mother Superior's favourite line " 'Tell them I came and no one answered/ that I kept my word,' he said", from Walter de la Mare's The Listeners. We left the convent for other schools - me to board - our pre-adolescent minds dripping Yeatsian dream-imagery, complex Eliot word patterns and Hopkins' religious lyricism. Even the tone deaf could hear something of the music of language. The nuns had cultivated our inner ear.

In my auditory imagination, Eliot's footfalls echoed - then along came Larkin. I fell in love with "his unfoolable mind expressing the melody of intelligence", in Heaney's perfect phrase. I gazed into those dark eyes behind those dark-rimmed spectacles with a passion I had once reserved for Eliot. Was I becoming promiscuous? Despite being consumed by guilt, I declared my loyalty: Larkin great (good didn't quite do it), Yeats better, Eliot best.

In the late 1980s and early '90s I progressed from being a poetry groupie (as Grey Gowrie dubbed himself during a reading of American poetry) and became a poetry junkie. At Valerie Eliot's invitation, I presented the first T.S. Eliot prize for Poetry to the outstanding Ciaran Carson at the Almeida Theatre in 1993 (this year's winner, announced last week, is the excellent Don Paterson) and was asked by her to read Eliot's own favourite poem, the very moving, very short Eyes that last I sae in dreams. I seemed unable to curb my poetry habit, even at polite London dinner parties, where the subject was rarely, if ever, mentioned. Something had to be done.

In 1987 I started a company, Gallery poets - Odette Gilbert kindly loaned me the use of her gallery in Cork Street. Tentatively, on behalf of my - mostly dead - poets' society I approached Eileen Atkins, Alan Bates, Gary Bond, Eleanor Bron, Simon Callow, Edward Fox, Jeremy Irons, Sian Philips, Geraldine McEwan and Ian McDiarmid. And many others. Every actor I asked said yes. Over the years England's finest actors made their way to that small London gallery to read, for no fee, path, Byron, Thomas, Auden and of course Larkin, Yeats and Eliot. The poets' estates were helpful, waiving fees or making modes demands. Each presentation was accompanied by a short introduction to the life and work of the poet, a structure which we still maintain.

Not everyone approves. Many are opposed to any public reading of poetry and especially by actors. The late Kingsley Amis, a passionate poetry lover, remonstrated with me during a discussion of a possible Larkin evening with the much-missed Alan Bates (no on read Larkin better ). "Oh my god no! No! No! Philip won't like this at all." Thankfully, "Philip" did indeed like it - a letter from him is one of my treasured possessions. "I can't bear actors reading poetry," others say. Why not? The understanding of metre, rhythm, tone and the deep intuitive intelligence the trained actor brings to a poem can make it sing in your mind of years. Poetry after all comes from the oral tradition.

A two-hour Eliot production entitle let us go now, you and I and read by Edward Fox, Eileen Atkins and Michael Gough, opened at the Lyric, Shaftesbury Avenue in 1987. The Stoll Moss management warned that "no one will come." To our mutual relief, the scheduled four-week run was extended to six weeks - the first and only time pure poetry had a West End run. It was helped, no doubt by Valerie Grove's review in the Evening Standard: "they queued and fought for tickets."

Encouraged by this success, two years ago and with the crucial support of the literary impresario Peter Florence and Orange Word we started a monthly West End poetry hour. Fiona Shaw, Judi Dench, Joseph Fiennes, Julian Dench, Joseph Fiennes, Julian Glover and Harriet Walter joined a kind of poetry repertory company. The actors read according to availability. Naturally, it is only with the greatest reluctance they miss the opportunity of a one-hour, unpaid poetry reading in favour of some paltry offer from Scorsese, Minghella or Spielberg. On those occasions their ever-generous colleagues step in.

This Tuesday, we are moving these monthly events to the British Library. Edward Fox, whose voice is perfectly attuned to Eliot and who, incidentally, knows all Four Quartets by heart, will read The Waste Land and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Ticket prices are low - £5 and £7.50 - and will remain so. This is not a commercial endeavour. "Why break the habits of a lifetime," sighs my husband.

I hope you will support us. You might discover, as I did many years ago, how, pace Proust and Alain de Button, poetry can save your life.

All proceeds, over and above the basic costs, will go to the Tristan Bastes Theatre at the Actors' Centre, a small contribution in recognition of the persistent, indeed astonishing generosity of actors, Some evenings will be dedicated, as they have been in the past, to Ted Hughes' Arvon Foundation, the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queens, Belfast, and William Sieghart's national Poetry day - lest anyone believe we're trapped in a Joycean obsession with the dead.

For the past two years, the writer Josephine hart has been in charge of a series of poetry readings in the West End and now at the British Library - the greatest poets of the 20th century, read by the best British actors of our time. Last month Edward Fox gave a searing rendition of works by T.S. Eliot, and on Wednesday Ralph Fiennes will tackle the lyrical, sometimes vicious verse of W.H. Auden. The scheme began in the 1980s. Hart, who directed Haymarket Publishing before becoming a full-time novelist, was "tired of boring people to death at dinner parties by saying that I couldn't understand why there were no public readings of great poetry". She and her husband started a company, Gallery Poets, and approached a sparkling cast.

Jeremy Irons, Simon Callow, Ian McKellen. Edward Fox, Eileen Atkins, Alan Bates and Geraldine McEwan had soon agreed to take part (for no fee), and the monthly readings began in s small gallery in Cork Street. With readings of selections of poets such as Yeats, Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath, they traced the poetic lineaments of the 20th century.

In 1987 they took the Lyric Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue for a month. The subject was Eliot, and the show, Let U Go, Then, You and I, feature Edward Fox, Eileen Atkins and Michael Gough. In the second half, Fox recited the whole of Eliot's wartime meditation Four Quartets. "Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood," hope T.S. Eliot, and the Quartets stunned the house to silence. Hart hopes soon to revive this show, which was the first West End run of poetry alone. Gallery Poets was reconfigured two years ago as West End Poetry and has now transferred to the intimate and acoustically glorious lecture theatre at the British Library.

And now it is the turn of Auden, a poet whose writing about politically troubled times feels particularly poignant in ours. Auden, says Hart, has more to each of us than we realise. She quotes As I Walked Out One Evening as "a wonderful thing to tell young people - how precious life is":

O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress;
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

Auden believed - or at least said he believed - that "in so far as poetry or any of the arts, can be said to have an ulterior purpose, it is, by telling the truth, to disenchant and disintoxicate". And much of his genius resides in the compression of scalding savagery or inconsolable sorrow into a metre of crystalline beauty and brevity. September 1, 1939, begun in America two days before Britain declared war on Germany, has been frequently rehearsed in the aftermath of attacks in later September:

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

The Fiennes evening will comprise a loose chronological selection of Auden's poems, with brief introductions by Hart. "Those to whom the poetry is unfamiliar need some introduction," she says, "although I'm sure we will have plenty who know it well. I am hoping that people who come and who aren't familiar with poetry will go out afterwards, buy the book and read it."

Poetry, she says, is more important to her than religion ever was, and she is hoping for a few conversions. She also hopes to stage an evening dedicated to translations, particularly of the work of the Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska.

All proceeds from the show will go to the Tristan Bates Theatre at the Actors' Centre, endowed by the late Sire Alan Bates in memory of his son.

An evening of W.H. Auden's Poetry, with Ralph Fiennes and Josephine Hart, was at the British Library Conference Centre, St Pancras, London, at 6.30 on February 18th.

It is a paradox of our wired society that, although slick verse abounds in advertising, rap, slams and open-mike contests, we hear very little life-enhancing poetry. Time was when every school-child could recite some Wordsworth or Keats. Without making any great moral claims, this provided an inner resource, a fund of pleasurable sounds and memories.

Having enjoyed the oral traditions of a Catholic upbringing in Ireland, the novelist Josephine Hart was struck by this gap in English culture. At her Mullingar convent school she had developed “a visceral reaction to the sound of language”. By the age of 12, she could recite chunks of Shakespeare and Yeats, and the nuns even introduced her to Eliot and Auden. As a result, she began to develop what she calls “her inner ear”.

This has stood her in good stead as the bestselling author of Damage and other novels. It is poetry that she liltingly describes as the highest form of expression — above prose and plays. “It has shaped not only how I write, but how I see life and experience. Through that inner ear you hear people in a deeper way. You have access then to what is a primitive gift. Eliot called it the auditory imagination.”

For some time, she has been sharing that gift in her adopted England by promoting poetry readings by leading actors. Over the last year, the monthly Josephine Hart Poetry Hour has become a top ticket at London’s British Library. A youthful audience listens rapturously as Ralph Fiennes brings resonance and meaning to Auden, or Roger Moore to Kipling.

A week tomorrow, Hart transfers this inspirational event to the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival. Charlotte Rampling is travelling specially from Paris, and Dominic West flies in that morning from Los Angeles to join Claire Bloom and Harriet Walter in declaiming Milton, Tennyson and others in a programme of poetry about the garden.

Part of Hart’s success is due to her high standards — both in material (she is not afraid to speak of the “canon”) and in performers (who give their services free, with profits going to the Actors Centre).

Does anything not work? Hart admits lyrical poetry has proved difficult — notably Byron’s love poems, though “Don Juan aches to be done out loud”. She was wary of Browning’s Andrea del Sarto — about the Italian painter worried that his uxoriousness has prevented him producing his masterpiece. “But Robert Hardy did this extraordinary monologue. It is a poem of unbelievable sexual obsession. People were stunned.”

An essential part of each programme is Hart’s witty, informed introduction, which sets each poet in context and emphasises her passion for the medium. “It sticks in the craw for me as an Irish woman to say so, but there have been more great poets in England than anywhere else in the world.” She has been astounded to find how little they are properly read. “So once a month I try to make it part of the cultural life of London that there should be a reading of great poetry.”

Of course, modern poets, such as Seamus Heaney, give readings all the time. But, as the thriving poetry-slam culture demonstrates, there are many approaches to poetry in performance. Like Dylan Thomas, its practitioners tend to become performers rather than poets.

For this reason, some purists argue against public readings altogether. For them the private act of engaging a poem on a page is paramount. You can linger over phrases and get a sense of the poem’s overall shape. Concrete poets have made a virtue of this, experimenting with the visual presentation of poetry through typography and collage.

For the poet Basil Bunting, on the other hand, “Poetry lies dead on the page, until some voice brings it to life.” He blamed silent reading for the public’s “distrust” of poetry. They had learnt to look for meaning rather than respond to the beauty of what they heard. “Poetry, like music,” he wrote, “is to be heard. It deals in sound.”

The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival offers additional means of developing Eliot’s auditory imagination. The best live poetry can be heard at the Hammer and Tongue Slam. Simon Armitage and Nick Laird, two of the brightest talents on the British poetry scene, will be reading their poems. Daisy Goodwin will be introducing her new “treasury” of Poems to Last a Lifetime. She has recently drawn flak in the London Review of Books for dumbing-down poetry – in particular, by producing anthologies marketed like self-help manuals. She could call on the support of not only Keats, for whom “the great end of poesy” was “that it should be a friend” but also of Hart, who turns to poetry for the most powerful outpourings of human emotion, whether “joy, grief, sexual love or political passion. If I want to express it, I find it better in poetry”.

The Poet in the Garden, with Bloom, Walter and Rampling, is on Monday, April 11, at 7.30pm, in the Sheldonian Theatre. Daisy Goodwin introduces Poems to Last a Lifetime, with readings, on Thursday, April 14, at 6.30pm. The Hammer and Tongue Slam is on Friday, April 15, at 8pm. Simon Armitage and Nick Laird discuss their work on Sunday, April 17, at 4pm.

Byline Sebastian Shakespeare
Evening Standard - 02 Nov 05

For those in the know, debates and poetry readings are fast becoming London's most romantic nights out

THE Royal Geographical Society in Kensington Gore is an unlikely
venue to see Hugh Grant and Jemima Khan. However the pair have been spotted
canoodling at the Intelligence Squared debates almost as many times as
they've been snapped leaving Annabel's.

In the past few months they've been in the thick of public discussions on
fidelity ("Monogamy is bad for the soul") and the media ("The trouble with
this country is the Daily Mail").

The couple haven't said much on the subject of either, confining their
contributions to giggling and knowledgeable whispering. But they evidently
enjoy their cultural nights out. The RGS, once home to deadbeats and bores,
has become a social mecca and a popular destination for romantic couples.

Its Intelligence Squared debates are at the vanguard of " intellidating" -
an emerging trend in London for more cerebral dates. From debates and poetry
readings to art fairs and wine lectures, savvy Londoners are eschewing the
tired formula of cocktails and a taxi fumble in favour of an altogether more
rarefied seduction.

"Dating is such a chore that it's nice to do something where you are not
stuck glaring at each other over supper for two hours," says writer Esther
Walker, 25, a regular on the intellidating scene.

"It's comforting to know that you are with someone who believes that all
your brain cells are functioning and not just the ones that tell you how to
put on lipstick and high heels."

Whether it's a reaction against dumbing down or simply a search for
something new to do on a night out, tickets for events such as Intelligence
Squared are now some of the hottest in town.

Their subjects are as cutting edge as its speakers. Last night Anna Ford,
who announced this week she is stepping down as a BBC newsreader, chaired a
debate on "The rise of China spells the decline of the West". One upcoming
motion is "Apart from chavs, the British have no class". Howard Jacobson,
Boris Johnson and Clement Freud will feature. You get to rub shoulders with
high- profile speakers ( Joan Bakewell, Peter Oborne, Charles Clarke and
Lance Price) as well as bask in the reflected intellectual glory.

Talking about anything controversial on a social engagement used to be
considered a bad idea.

But philosopher AC Grayling believes this is no longer the case.

"These are certainly the best dates for couples with upwards of a few brain
cells between them, because the amount of time that can be absorbed by sex,
eating, drinking and shopping is not enough to make conversation and shared
cultural interests irrelevant," he says.

"There is need for more intelligence in company where there is sensibility.
There is pleasure in enjoying it with someone you care about. Intellectual
and cultural activities are, so to speak, cocaine for the mind - and even
celebrities have cerebella.

"So the pleasure of sharing good thought and talk, poetry and theatre, When
mo Jeremy O'G Squared the to make deb Jemima and in the front The fortn
tently sell founders sp decided to demand fo intellectual Others ar cultural
ba the Institut weekend o Ideas, discu of all time, a more ins tion than a
are planned The Econo increasingly debates held on subjects broadcastin These
are daters", but Futures Sq events club over 30 tha around Tat with dinner
"Going to because the Will Ramsa able Art Fa have those less awkwa if someone
chances are whether th one you greatly like, adds imension to the relationves
it substance."

oguls John Gordon and Grady started Intelligence ey said that they wanted
bating sexy - and having d the real-life Hugh Grant row has certainly helped.

nightly debates consisout - proof that its potted a niche when they try
and meet "pent up or participating in the * struggles of the day".

re now jumping onto the andwagon. Last Saturday, e of Ideas hosted a whole
f debate, the Battle of ussing the greatest ideas which certainly made for
spiring Sunday assignaa hungover brunch. More d.

omist, too, has found an y lively audience at its d at the ICA and the RSA
s from football ("A waste of time?"), organic food ("A con?") to Latin
America, human rights and the UN.

This autumn their events return with topics such as "Offending the feelings
of religious believers should not be a crime" and "Digital technology will
strengthen public service ng, not undermine it".

e for experienced " intellit the beginner should try quared. This is a
social b for affluent Londoners at organises guided tours te Modern and the
V&A r afterwards.

o look at art is great ere is a distraction," says ay, founder of the
Affordair. "On a date when you pregnant pauses, it's far rd than over dinner.
Also e shares your taste, the e you have a better idea of ey are the one for
you."

The past year has seen plenty of other cultural events gain in popularity -
any of which do justice to to your inner thinking man's/woman's crumpet.
Josephine Hart's Poetry Hour at the British Library, started in January 2004,
were begun by the novelist because she wanted to make poetry accessible.

The readings - organised with the help of Prince William's friend Rose van
Cutsem (nee Astor) - are short enough to be a perfect post-work, pre-dinner
culture shock. Hart, wife of Maurice Saatchi, former Booker judge and author
of Damage, has a phenomenal phonebook of contacts which she raids when
putting together the programme.

SHE has persuaded an impressive array of actors and writers to participate,
from Bob Geldof to Ralph Fiennes. New James Bond Daniel Craig may have played
Ted Hughes in the film Sylvia but this is the only poetry event at which you
are likely to find a 007 (Roger Moore) reading in person. And frankly, what
date wouldn't be impressed with that?

"The poetry hour is a sexy thing to be invited to," says Hart. "If someone
took me on a date to the poetry I would have no choice but to fall in love
with them.

"The readings excite people about language. They are master classes in the
seduction of language; the hour is intellectual but also romantic without
ever being corny - by 7.45pm you will be moved, thrilled and stimulated by
what you've both witnessed Luckily, the bar at the British Library is there
to cater for the next stage of your date."

Whether it's carrying on the debate over dinner after Intelligence Squared
or musing on Keats vs Dylan, a cultural date will broaden your mind and your
social horizons.

"Such relationships are more likely to last than those limited to the area
between the navel and the knees," says AC Grayling.

Additional reporting by Olivia Cole.

GREY MATTER IS THE NEW BLACK Intelligence Squared Atmosphere and argument at
the Royal Geographical Society.

Who goes: Hugh Grant, Jemima Khan, Francis Wheen, Joan Bakewell.

What to say: Something intelligent.

Future events: "Better rough justice than another 9/11" - Alasdair Palmer,
Charles Clarke, Jeremy Greenstock, Edward Fitzgerald on 24 November.

"Apart from Chavs, the British have no class" Howard Jacobson, Boris
Johnson, Clement Freud to chair.

7 December. Tickets £20.

Facts: RGS, 1 Kensington Gore, SW7.

Tube: South Kensington.

020 7591 3000.

Josephine Hart's Poetry Hour at the British Library Who goes: Bob Geldof,
Roger Moore, Ralph Fiennes.

What to say: Just listen.

Future events: An Evening of Poetry Inspired by the Garden in the
Conference Centre with Charlotte Rampling, Dom West, Claire Bloom and Harriet
Walter.

24 November. £7.50, £5 conc.

Facts: British Library, 96 Euston Road, NW1. Tube: King's Cross.

0870 444 1500.

London Art Fairs Frieze, Photo London, Art Fortnight London, Zoo, Scope, the
Affordable Art Fair - the list is endless even if your budget isn't.

Who goes: Tracey Emin, Sam Taylor-Wood, Jay Jopling, Claudia Schiffer,
George Michael, Gwyneth Paltrow, William Boyd.

What to say: "That would look great over my bed." It's carte blanche to
drink champagne and pretend to know a lot about art.

Facts: Check listings.

Christie's evening classes Petrus-Latour masterclass and wine-tasting on 9
November, £195 per person.

Spring-Summer 2006 The Arts of Antiquity Monday evenings, February-March.

The Caravaggio Phenomenon Tuesday evenings, February-March.

A Brief History of Contemporary Art Tuesday evenings, May-June.

Understanding Art: The Origins of European Art Tuesday evenings June-July
series costs £125; individual lectures £30.

Who goes: Pretty art students, handsome art collectors and bored ladies
married to bankers.

What to say: "Do you want to see my Caravaggio?"

Facts: 8 King Street, SW1.

Tube: Green Park. 020 7839 9060.

Futures Squared Who goes: 30-plus, cash-rich, time-poor singles.

What to say: "See you next week."

Future events: Tate Modern tour and dinner, V&A Arts and Craft
International tour and talk, Edvard Munch talk and tour Facts: Membership
£250 a year.

53 Chandos Place, WC2. Tube: Covent Garden. 020 7812 6630.

MORE CEREBRAL DATES Backstage tours of the Royal Opera House Tours run three
times a day Mon-Fri - but also might make a good Saturday lunch date at
12.30pm or 1.30pm. Lasts 1hr 30 minutes. Book tickets through the RoH box
office, £9.

Facts: Bow Street, WC2. Tube: Covent Garden. 020 7304 4000.

ICA Lectures Future Cities: The cyborg and the city. About how computers are
going to take over the world. Speakers are William J Mitchell, professor of
architecture and media arts at MIT and Kevin Warwick, professor of
cybernetics at Reading University. 4 November. Tickets £8, ICA mems £6.

Facts: The Mall, SW1. Tube: Charing Cross. 020 7930 3647.

The Morton's Arts Club A jolly insider's view of the gossip in the auction
scene on 7 November.

Speakers are Tim Hunter, director of Old Master's at Christies and Matthew
Stephenson, associate director of impressionist and modern art. Free but you
have to go with a member. Membership £800 a year, £400 for under-30s, £250
for a ladies' day membership.

Facts: 28 Berkeley Square, W1. Tube: Green Park/Bond Street. 020 7499
Notting Hill Arts Club Hosts Beachclub, which describes itself as a "monthly
showcase of new photography, short films, graphics and music from
Scandinavia". Free before 8pm, £5 after.

Facts: 21 Notting Hill Gate, W11. Tube: Notting Hill Gate. 020 7460 4459.

THE JOSEPHINE HART POETRY HOUR

HART LANDS

Source: The Times Literary Supplement
Friday September 09, 2005
Peter Stothard

The Other Mrs Saatchi

EVENING STANDARD
13 Aug 05
MELANIE MCDONAGH

Rampling, Roses and Rhyme

The power of the spoken word

The Empire Strikes Back

My Long Love Affair With Poetry

Fiennes shines light on works of Auden

The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival

Poetry: Giving voice to verse

THE JOSEPHINE HART POETRY HOUR

HART LANDS Source: The Times Literary Supplement Friday September 09, 2005 Peter Stothard

The Other Mrs Saatchi

EVENING STANDARD 13 Aug 05 MELANIE MCDONAGH

Rampling, Roses and Rhyme

The power of the spoken word

The Empire Strikes Back

My Long Love Affair With Poetry

Fiennes shines light on works of Auden

The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival

Poetry: Giving voice to verse

HART LANDS

Source: The Times Literary Supplement
Friday September 09, 2005
Peter Stothard

EVENING STANDARD
13 Aug 05
MELANIE MCDONAGH