This volume brings together eight decades of work by a writer described in
the Dictionary of National Biography as “a man of letters, attaining
equal distinction as poet, historian, and political commentator.” Robert
Conquest’s many honours include the PEN Brazil Prize (for the best long poem
about the Second World War), a Festival of Britain verse prize, and the Michael
Braude Award for Light Verse. His poems cover an astonishing range: Clive James
praised his “fastidiously chiselled poems which proved his point that cool
reason was not necessarily lyricism’s enemy”, while Philip Larkin, applauding
Conquest’s virtuosity with the limerick form, inscribed a copy of High Windows
“To Bob, Il Miglior Fabbro (or whatever it was) – at least over five lines.”
Conquest neatly skewered pretension wherever he found it, but throughout his
long life also wrote eloquent poems of love, longing, and loss. As the poet and
critic David Mason observed, “These are poems by a man of the world who has
seen and studied much and has apparently lived with gusto. It is good to be in
his company.”