From the threshold of his own fiftieth year, Duncan Bush returns to the ’Fifties of his youth as a springboard from which to explore the second half of the twentieth century in ways often more autobiographical than anything we’ve seen from his prizewinning previous collections.

A vivid series of viewpoints starts with memories of a post-war Britain, a childhood obsessed with reading and American cinema, and moves forward to less personal experiences and then to married life and fatherhood, middle age, and the view from ’mainland Europe’ at the end of the ’Nineties. In a prose essay, this most committed of individualists also writes of individual and national history; and, in memorable poems, on gardening, landscape, BSE and the crisis in farming, and - compellingly - on the televised funeral of Princess Diana.