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My Life in Verse
My Life in Verse
Aug 11, 2025 1:09 PM

Author:Penguin,Alexis Kirschbaum

My Life in Verse

For 2009, the BBC is planning a major 'Poetry Season' on BBC2 and BBC4. This landmark series on British Poetry will be the centrepiece of the season, and Penguin Classics is publishing the official anthology to tie-in with it. The anthology will include all the poems read or mentioned in the series as well as a large number of others selected to complement them. It should prove to be a hugely successful way of bringing the best of British poetry to a wide audience.

The TV series is from the people who brought you Who Do You Think You Are and will consist of 4x60 minute episodes following a celebrity presenter on his or her life-journey through poetry. Each episode will focus on a theme that has inspired some of the great poetry of the past, and continues to do so, such as love and death, war and nationhood, nature and religion. The celebrities will be passionate and articulate about the way poetry has changed and enhanced their lives through all its various stages.

Among them are poems chosen by actress Sheila Hancock exploring human relationships and the loss of a loved one, from Yeats and Tennyson to Blake and Larkin. Comic Robert Webb has selected the modern verse that inspired him, including the love sonnets of E. E. Cummings and the wordplay of Don Paterson. Musician Cerys Matthews celebrates the rich verse of Wales, Ireland and Scotland [poets], and writer Malorie Blackman chooses the [rich variety of] poetry that spoke to her, from Psalm 23 to Roald Dahl to Benjamin Zephaniah.

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It's dangerous to use the word genius to describe a writer, but I'll risk it with him

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For as long as I'm immersed in a P.G. Wodehouse book, it's possible to keep the real world at bay and live in a far, far nicer, funnier one where happy endings are the order of the day

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Not only the funniest English novelist who ever wrote but one of our finest stylists

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P.G. Wodehouse remains the greatest chronicler of a certain kind of Englishness, that no one else has ever captured quite so sharply, or with quite as much wit and affection

—— Julian Fellowes

A genius ... Elusive, delicate but lasting

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Witty and effortlessly fluid. His books are laugh-out-loud funny

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The Wodehouse wit should be registered at Police HQ as a chemical weapon

—— Kathy Lette

The funniest writer ever to put words to paper

—— Hugh Laurie

The greatest comic writer ever

—— Douglas Adams

P.G. Wodehouse wrote the best English comic novels of the century

—— Sebastian Faulks

Sublime comic genius

—— Ben Elton

Quite simply, the master of comic writing at work

—— Jane Moore

To pick up a Wodehouse novel is to find oneself in the presence of genius - no writer has ever given me so much pure enjoyment

—— John Julius Norwich

Compulsory reading for anyone who has a pig, an aunt - or a sense of humour!

—— Lindsey Davis

The Wodehouse wit should be registered at Police HQ as a chemical weapon

—— Kathy Lette

Witty and effortlessly fluid. His books are laugh-out-loud funny

—— Arabella Weir

The funniest writer ever to put words to paper

—— Hugh Laurie

The greatest comic writer ever

—— Douglas Adams

P.G. Wodehouse wrote the best English comic novels of the century

—— Sebastian Faulks

Sublime comic genius

—— Ben Elton

You don't analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour

—— Stephen Fry
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