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Enter the 2024 Telegraph Poetry Competition
The theme of our latest contest is ‘Art’ – Tristram Fane Saunders offers a few tips on how to get started
Today we launch the Telegraph’s fourth annual poetry competition. As ever, it’s free to enter for anyone who feels like picking up a pen. We’re open to work in any style and any form, and keen to hear from readers who might be new to poetry, or trying their hand at it for the first time in years.
The winning entry will be printed in The Daily Telegraph, and recited in a short film by a leading actor. In previous years, we’ve had performances from Harriet Walter, Juliet Stevenson and David Suchet. I can’t yet name our star for 2024, but readers are in for a treat. The winner will also receive a year’s free digital subscription to the Telegraph, for themselves or a friend.
This year, for the competition’s theme of “Art”, we want words that paint a thousand pictures. Ekphrastic poetry – verse describing artworks – is one of the oldest traditions in literature, stretching back as far as Homer. Think of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, WH Auden musing on Bruegel and the old masters in “Musée des Beaux Arts”, or Christina Rossetti’s veiled dig at her painter brother Dante Gabriel in her sonnet “In an Artist’s Studio”.
To enter, send in a poem – only one poem, please – by January 19 2024, via email or good oldfashioned ink on paper to the address below. Entries chiselled in marble, sculpted from clay or painted six-foot canvases will not be accepted.
I’ll be judging the competition alongside the Seamus Heaney
Prize-winning poet Laura Scott. Her recent collection The Fourth Sister –a Telegraph and Observer book of the month – features several brilliant poems inspired by Chekhov’s plays.
Perhaps, like Laura, you might like to use theatre as a starting point for your poetry. After all, “Art” can be a broad umbrella term. We’re open to poems inspired by any area of the arts, from photography and music to dance, theatre and film.
Or even television. Why not? “House”, from Don Paterson’s
40 Sonnets, takes its inspiration from Hugh Laurie’s pill-popping TV doctor: “We too have known that three o’clock abyss / between the differential and the kiss / where a man must face the smaller man within / or remember where he stashed the Vicodin.”
You don’t have to start from a great piece of art – or even a particularly good one. Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Large Bad Picture” describes her great-uncle’s clumsy attempt at painting, yet turns it into something beautiful.
The artwork you describe might exist only in your imagination. The painter “Frà Pandolf ” never existed until Robert Browning invented him for “My Last Duchess”. Like Browning, you might try a dramatic monologue. His poem is in the voice of a murderous duke, regarding the portrait of his unfortunate late wife, but yours might give us the voice of the artist, or the figure in the painting. (Why is the Mona Lisa smiling? Tell us.)
You might like to sketch out the personality of an artist we know little about. Vivian Maier, the American photographer, hid her light under a bushel, becoming famous only after her death, but Shane McCrae takes us inside her brilliant mind – like “a lamp shining in an abandoned building” – in a marvellous poem from his 2022 collection Cain Named the Animal.
If you’re stuck for inspiration, reading other poets’ work is always a good place to start. The Telegraph is the only UK national newspaper that prints poems every week; you’ll find them in our Review supplement on Saturdays, and on Thursday evenings in our Culture Newsletter email (sign up at telegraph.co.uk/ culturenewsletter).
Good luck!
The Covid Inquiry is asking all the wrong questions. It seems obsessed with asking who was at fault, who’s to blame, and who called his colleagues a pack of drivelling simpletons on WhatsApp. Ultimately, though, there are far more important questions it needs to consider. And in particular, the following:
Did lockdown drive everyone under 40 stark staring bonkers?
This is a matter of crucial national significance. And sadly, the signs don’t look good. This week, a poll carried out by research group More in Common revealed that a sizeable chunk of the British public want the Government to reimpose Covid restrictions. This is alarming enough. But it gets worse.
Because the people keenest on reimposing restrictions are the young.
It may sound wildly counterintuitive. But it’s true.
A full third of millennials (those aged 27-42) said they wanted the Prime Minister to shut down all nightclubs, for example, and to bring back the “rule of six”, which limited the number of people with whom you were legally permitted to socialise. And Gen Z (11-26) were almost as enthusiastic.
It’s staggering. Think of all the ways in which lockdown harmed these younger generations. It disrupted their schooling, their degrees, their social lives, their love lives, their nascent careers, their first years as parents.
And what did they gain from it? Nothing. Because, apart from a tiny minority who had serious preexisting health problems, Covid posed little threat to the young.
Yet, now they’ve been given back their freedom, many of them don’t want it. They’d rather be locked down again.
This should worry us all. Not least because young people are supposed to rebel against authority. That was what young hippies did in the 1960s, and young punks in the 1970s, and young ravers in the 1980s. Yet in the 2020s, apparently, the young love authority. So much so, they’re clamouring for more of it. “Strip us of our freedoms! We demand to be oppressed! Mum, Dad – send me to my room at once!”
Older people may find youthful rebellion annoying. But it’s an essential part of becoming an adult. In rejecting authority – whether it be the authority of parents, teachers or politicians – the young are showing that they want to be independent, to make their own decisions, to take their own risks. Yet today’s young lockdown enthusiasts aren’t doing that. They don’t want to take responsibility for themselves. They want the Government to take responsibility for them, instead. In short: they’re refusing to grow up.
We knew lockdown had harmed the young. But clearly the damage was even worse than we thought. Millions of them, it appears, are suffering from a severe case of Stockholm Syndrome. They’re prisoners who have come to love imprisonment.
Then again, there is one other possible explanation. Which is that the young are being quite extraordinarily noble. They’ve decided that they’re willing to sacrifice their fun, their freedoms and their futures, purely to protect the elderly.
If that’s the case, however, they should look at the results of this poll. Because the elderly, it’s clear, don’t want their help. Even though they’re far more vulnerable (and far less likely to go to nightclubs), they’re actually less keen on bringing back restrictions.
And quite right, too. When I’m their age, I won’t want to spend my days locked up at home. I’ll want to make the most of whatever time I have left, by going out, enjoying myself, seeing my grandchildren.
But I won’t be able to do that, if some do-gooding nitwits have decided to have the country shut down. Thus ruining my life, by trying to save it.
“I could no longer stay silent,” said Lady Victoria Hervey. In an interview this week, the aristocratic TV star and journalist, 47, detailed allegations of horrific abuse towards her sister, Lady Isabella Hervey, by Isabella’s ex-husband Christophe de Pauw.
Hervey, the eldest daughter of the 6th Marquess of Bristol, said her sister had been “broken” by the alleged mental and physical abuse, which she claimed included de Pauw punching Isabella in hospital soon after she had given birth. She posted pictures of her sister’s injuries on her Instagram account, where she has more than half a million followers.
“I have been really fearing for [Isabella’s] safety and mental wellbeing,” she told Mail Online. “She was feeling that nothing was ever going to improve, and nobody was going to find out what he was really like.”
Isabella, 41, a model and reality TV star, and de Pauw, a Belgian businessman, were married in 2014 but separated in August. They have two sons and a daughter. Victoria said she was pushed into going public after watching her sister being worn down.
“She was just so broken, and so depressed about the whole thing. A lot of it has been mental abuse, making her feel s--t all of the time, as well as physical abuse.”
In text accompanying the Instagram pictures, Victoria made allegations of infidelity against Mr de Pauw. “Christophe de Pauw should be put away,” she wrote. “He is a serial abuser. It has got to a point that we can no longer stay silent.”
In a separate interview last week, Isabella had made similar accusations. “There are many more images and videos, but the mental abuse was, for me, the worst.”
The Telegraph has contacted Mr de Pauw for comment.
The grim allegations mark the latest episode in a family saga that has been dogged by tragedy and notoriety for hundreds of years. The 1st Earl of Bristol, John Hervey, was a Whig politician who was given the title as a reward for his loyalty during the Glorious Revolution. He had 20 children, including John, the 2nd Baron Hervey. An aristocratic literary type, John was embroiled in a tussle of love with the Prince of Wales over Anne Vane, and fought a duel with William Pulteney over a seditious pamphlet. He was known to be bisexual, and had a 10-year relationship with a man, too.
The 3rd Earl of Bristol, Augustus Hervey, was a decorated 18thcentury naval officer with a chequered personal life. In 1744, he married Elizabeth Chudleigh, a courtesan and courtier. Twenty years later he paid Ann Elliot, an actress, to come off the stage to be his mistress. Later, he took another mistress, Mary Nesbitt, who had been a model for the painter Joshua Reynolds. The family during this period were endlessly short of money. Frederick, the 4th Earl of Bristol, died on the road in Italy in 1803, having had his assets seized by Napoleon’s troops.
There followed a period of relative calm until the 20th century, when the 6th Marquess of Bristol, Victor Hervey, Victoria and Isabella’s father, brought the family roaring back into the headlines. A playboy aristocrat who married three times and was nicknamed the Reptile, he did much to undo the work the Victorian earls had done in making the Herveys respectable.
Born in 1915, Victor went to Eton and Sandhurst, but was asked to leave the latter for bad behaviour. As a young man, he developed a penchant for theft, which led to his becoming the ringleader of a gang of jewellery robbers from wellto-do families who were known as the Mayfair Playboys. This was the era of Raffles, the gentleman thief, but there was nothing civilised about some of their activities. In 1937, four of the gang were arrested for the violent robbery of a Cartier boss, whom they had lured to a hotel in Mayfair before coshing him and stealing £13,000 worth of diamond rings. While Victor was not involved in that incident, and would complain that people unfairly associated him with it, in 1939 he was sent to prison for three years for stealing more than £5,000 worth of jewellery, rings and fur from two properties in Park Lane and Mayfair. The recorder at the Old Bailey described him as the “mainspring of the conspiracy”. On hearing the verdict, his upstanding father, the diplomat and politician Herbert Hervey, wept in court.
Unlike some gentleman thieves, Victor needed the money. In 1937 he had declared bankruptcy, with debts of £123,000, more than £8million in today’s money, having come unstuck trying to sell arms to both sides during the Spanish Civil War. Eventually his arms trading came good – he was one of Franco’s leading dealers – and he amassed a fortune estimated at £50million.
The eccentric stories continued. A couple arriving for a shooting weekend in Sussex in the 1960s at Ickworth, the family seat, noticed Victor leaning from an upper window. As they drove nearer, he opened fire, forcing them to run for cover. A family friend recalled passing the Bag O’Nails, a pub on Buckingham Palace Road, in London, where they were told Victor had “emptied a revolver into the ceiling”. He told a friend, Moira Lister, he had shot two men in a mutiny while treasure-hunting on Cocos Island off the coast of Costa Rica. A photo later surfaced from the incident in Cocos Island, of Victor “standing with his foot on four dead bodies”. In 1979, six years before Victor died, he moved his family to Monte Carlo, vowing never to set foot in the UK again.
Sorrier tales were to come. Victor married three times and had six children: a son, John, and a stillborn daughter, Anne, by his second wife, Lady Juliet Wentworth-Fitzwilliam, and four, including Victoria and Isabella, by his third wife, Yvonne Marie Hervey. John, Victor’s heir, born in 1954, had an unhappy life from the start, despite his wealth and titles. Victor treated him cruelly. A school friend of John’s at
Harrow, Jamie Spencer-Churchill, said Victor “created the monster that John became”. Openly gay and hedonistic, John was a fixture of the British tabloids in the 1970s and 1980s thanks to a stream of reported incidents: opening a champagne fridge by firing a shotgun at it; dodging a traffic jam on the M11 by driving at 140mph on the hard shoulder; constant cocaine and heroin use. A friend remembered a party of John’s in a private suite at Claridge’s. “All the cocaine was on the left-hand side of the mantelpiece, and all the heroin was on the right. In lines,” he said. “You took whichever one you liked.” He was jailed twice on drugs charges and died in 1999, having lost Ickworth as well as the rest of his fortune. His half-brother Nicholas had died by suicide a year earlier.
Victoria became famous in the 1990s, the heiress-apparent to Tamara Beckwith and Tara Palmer-Tomkinson in the pantheon of witty aristocratic blonde party girls. Speaking about John in a Guardian interview in 2001, Victoria described him as “evil”.
“What happened to him was just awful,” she added. “When you see someone lose everything, it puts you off. I mean he blew everything.”
In recent years she has not shied from controversy. A sometime girlfriend of Prince Andrew’s, she backed Ghislaine Maxwell’s remarks that the notorious photo of him with his arm around then 17-year-old Virginia Roberts was “fake”. “At the end of the day he says he’s never met her and he’s always stood by that,” she said. “If you look at everything, even when they did settle [out of court] ... he didn’t apologise because why would he?”
She has embraced conspiracy theories, saying in 2021 that the Covid vaccine was part of a play by Bill Gates “to depopulate the world”.
Isabella started out as a model before several appearances in reality TV shows. She won the second series of Channel 4’s athletics competition The Games and then appeared on Celebrity Love Island, Celebrity MasterChef and Sky’s Cirque De Celebrité. Recently she has become an elite cyclist, representing the UK at the UCI championships in Glasgow.
“I didn’t want to publicise all this, as I’m a private person, but things have got worse and worse this year,” she told the Mail after the split.
In an Instagram caption, Victoria said she was sharing “to give other women the courage to speak out as it took my sister a long time”.
The Herveys are due some happiness.