"Murray is the best kind of literary biographer" – The Financial Times.
For more information about the books of Nicholas Murray
click HERE and access his website
Winner of the 2015 Basil Bunting Award for poetry

Monday 1 November 2021

The Spin Doctor’s Lament

 



The Spin-Doctor’s Lament


Would that Keir Starmer were more of a charmer:

a dab hand at the glad hand like Barack Obama.

For politics are tough and it’s just not enough

to set out your stall for the tumbled Red Wall

as a principled chap who shrinks from the crap.

Those recently Blue care nothing for you

nor the desperate poor slumped on the floor,

in cardboard cities that no one pities

nor the migrant boats that contain no votes:


‘This is England, mate, where it’s simply too late

to raise the red flag or the spectre of Mag;

we’re the much-courted middle, not Waitrose but Lidl.

To the son of a toolmaker we prefer a wiseacre

whose path was beaten through prep school and Eton

and later the fogeyish groves of The Spectator;

he’s the man for our times and his putative crimes

put nobody off: so give us a toff

any day of the week to a well-meaning geek.’



Wednesday 9 June 2021

Huxley and Orwell: A New E-Book

 Huxley or Orwell? 

The Battle of the Books.

by Nicholas Murray 

a talk given at the 

Presteigne Festival

23 August 2019

 




My talk on the rival dystopian visions of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has just been published as an e-book available FREE from Apple Books.






Friday 21 May 2021

City Lights: a new poetry collection from Melos

My latest poetry collection City Lights published by the Melos Press is now out.  This wide-ranging and versatile 32-page pamphlet collection contains the longer sequences “The Song of Rhodri” (the voice of an imaginary medieval Welsh bard) and “The World Tree” (poems about trees in myth and reality drawing on Norse legend) as well as poems of contemporary political resonance. From the Welsh countryside to Washington DC and all points in between these poems are both lyrical and engaged.

My recent collections, A Quartet in Winter and The Yellow Wheelbarrow can also be ordered here.





Wednesday 27 January 2021

St Valentine’s Day approaches

 


























This month’s Reader’s Recommendation from Seren Books. 20 years old and still available for 14th February.  “This mult-faceted jewel is a reader’s delight,” said The Independent on publication.