Life, Love and The Archers: recollections, reviews and other prose

Description

Wendy Cope has long been one of the nation's best-loved poets, with her sharp eye for human foibles and wry sense of humour. For the first time, Life, Love and the Archers brings together the best of her prose - recollections, reviews and essays from the light-hearted to the serious, taken from a lifetime of published and unpublished work, and all with Cope's lightness of touch. Here readers can meet the Enid-Blyton-obsessed schoolgirl, the ambivalent daughter, the amused teacher, the sensitive journalist, the cynical romantic and the sardonic television critic, as well as touching on books and writers who have informed a lifetime of reading and writing. Wendy Cope is a master of the one-liner as well as the couplet, the telling review as well as the sonnet, and Life, Love and the Archers gives us a wonderfully entertaining and unforgettable portrait of one of England's favourite writers.

Wendy Cope read history at Oxford and then worked for 15 years as a London primary school teacher. Her first book of poems, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, was published in 1986. Since then she has been a freelance writer. Her most recent book of poems is Family Values, published in 2011. She lives in Ely.

Funny, melancholy and devastatingly observant. - The Times Without doubt the wittiest of contemporary English poets. - Dr Rowan Williams Nobody can match Wendy Cope when it comes to writing about men and love. - Daily Mail That rarest of things: a best-selling poet. - Independent