Poetry of fine precision

modern, gay epic response to Howards End, in London’s West End, while Maurice, his tale of furtive Edwardian gay desire, has just been staged, and the film version starring Hugh Grant is on re-release. More recently we’ve had the TV serialisation of Howards End, which Middleton “couldn’t hack”. We agree, however, that we love the Emma Thompson-Anthony Hopkins film version.

“At school, we were given Forster’s collected short stories,” Middleton recalls. “I heartily recommend them. There’s a 1902 story called The Story of a Panic -- it’s the first story Forster had published -- and it is about an intervention by Pan. It’s just really good, weird but modern. I have no evidence that Syd ever read the story The Machine Stops, the futuristic one I talk about in the book, which I think I read at school. It is great because it anticipates the internet but it doesn’t hold up quite so well as the cloven-hoof material. That is what I love about Forster’s work, it is all of its time but it transcends its time -- and the humour. I don’t often laugh when reading fiction but I do with him.”

We talk at length about Howards End, “a book that changed everything, he moved the goalposts,” and Middleton points out how Leonard Bast walks from London to the eponymous house – “Another link with Syd, who famously walked from London to his mother’s Cambridge home. Bast has this questingness about him -- and that is what it is about Syd and Forster. They are never in a comfort zone.

“Nor am I -- I am definitely way out of it now I’m turning the book into a play. It sounds really up itself but I just can’t make up dialogue that is not in The Ballad... For me, that’s become the historical record. I really believe that these two men actually did meet.” Me too.

A Selected Poems is always a good opportunity to trace a poet’s trajectory over the years. Jamie is renowned, justly, as one of our best poets of Scotland’s landscape and nature. Her poems on birds are alone worth the cover price. The poems, written with fine precision, move from Scotland to Istanbul, Jerusalem, Tibet and the Karakorum mountains of India and Pakistan. The Bonniest

Companie (2015), her most recent collection, contains poems written during the year of the independence referendum. There are some excellent selections, including poems that cast a backward glance at childhood – the superb The Girls is a treat – and that explore Scottish identity within the natural world.

COLLUSION: HOW RUSSIA HELPED TRUMP WIN THE WHITE HOUSE Luke Harding

Between June and December 2016, ex-MI6 intelligence officer Richard Steele wrote a dossier that examined allegations Donald Trump had a compromised relationship with Russia. Steele found that senior figures in the Kremlin had been “cultivating and supporting ... Trump for at least five years”. In this insightful and thorough book, Harding, an expert on Russian spycraft, uses this dossier as a template to trace the connections between the Russian secret service, lawyers, oligarchs and Trump’s campaign team, some of whom would serve in his cabinet. Harding goes through the main cast, analysing who these people are and their motives for helping Trump get into office. It’s an unnerving story, full of intrigue, political corruption and dirty money. Harding shows that Trump’s presidency, far from being anti-establishment, is the murky side of the establishment stepping into the spotlight of power.

Marie is a nurse who lives on the island of Mayotte, a French departement in the Mozambique Channel. After she struggles to become pregnant, she adopts a baby called Moise, given to her by a refugee in hospital. When Moise finds out that Marie is not his biological mother, he starts to resent her and finds a home among a gang of teenagers in the island’s largest slum, Gaza. Then Marie dies. Moise is left alone and becomes embroiled in horrendous violence and destitution. The novel is narrated from several different voices which retread the same ground. Although Appanah’s style is otherworldly and poetic, and her control of perspective is brilliant, the novel does want for a credible distinction between the narrative voices. Nevertheless this is a poignant and terrifying portrait of a peculiar island.