Rhyme & Reason by Mark Forsyth (Allen & Unwin, 2025)
Poetry
For six centuries people have been reading poetry for enjoyment - for fun, romance, religion and entertainment - and this is a book about those people. Rhyme & Reason takes you from a medieval accountant (called Chauser) trying to entertain his lord through adoring sonnets and notebooks containing dirty poems and into the heart of byronmania and the Victorian hearth, to help you understand why poetry has had such an enduring hold on the British phyche.