Ian on Sunday

I do not think I am the only one to get the feeling that the world is heating up in more ways than one and spinning out of control.

I have always tended to think – against a great deal of evidence I must admit – that many other things are fundamentally more important than politics. 

If you can, every now and then it is good to escape the reality which you have settled into.

At high tide, when the wind is strong, from my veranda in Bel Air Gardens I could swear the sea seems taller.

I wrote an essay thirty-two years ago which at ninety still has not lost its meaning.

A day is dulled and dimmed if it passes and I do not pick up a book of poems in my library, browse in some anthology, find a new poem in some magazine or at least before my eyes shut glance at some old favourite lines from Hopkins, Walcott, Yeats, Carter or a score of other supreme masters of the art and craft of making poems.

It is astonishing to think that Derek Walcott first published poems in the 1940s.

Our lives of such infinite value come and go in a whirl of busyness. 

We cannot afford to cramp or antagonise or even bore our intellectuals and our artists, our wits and our craftsmen, our dreamers and our thinking men and women.

The poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins – glancing and incandescent – is some of the most extraordinary to be found in English.

To put it mildly, West Indies Cricket – especially Test Cricket – has fallen on parlous times.

I tell the story of Tony Judt. Tony Judt was a writer on recent world history whom I greatly admired. 

I have always loved sport. All my boyhood and youth I delighted in games.

“You gave me gifts, God-Enchanter.   I give you thanks for good and ill.

History often saddles people with reputations that are undeserved. Take Florence Nightingale.

Life at 90 is full of interest but the interests are now mostly sedentary.

Intermittently through the years, and especially during memorable times up the immense and soul-redeeming Essequibo, I liked to read Shelley – as we all should do from time to time since he is pre-eminently the poet of hope.

How is a great poem created? It is a mystery. It is like asking for an explanation of a square cut by Gary Sobers or a cover drive by Rohan Kanhai.

Everywhere in the world the ordinary man in the street has been brainwashed into supposing that the only thing that matters is economic success.

I once received a letter from a fifth-form student in England.