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Samuel West at home in London. Photograph: Mark Harrison/Camera Press The actor on his pandemic poetry jukebox, life lessons of the Moomins, the pros and cons of Twitter, and how to reboot regional theatre Sun 7 Mar 2021 04.30 EST Samuel West, 54, one of the best verse speakers of his generation, has played Hamlet, Anthony Blunt (twice) and recently become Siegfried Farnon in Channel 5’s All Creatures Great and Small; he is currently working on the second series. The son of Prunella Scales and Timothy West, he lives with his partner, the playwright Laura Wade, and their two daughters, age...

When Frost was spectre-grey, The weakening eye of day. ‘The Darkling Thrush’, but no matter how much I read it, it’s new every time. The opening verse is straightforward, pretty spare, and yet so filled with magic energy that it conjures Hardy vividly for me. There he is - I could tell you what he’s wearing if you asked - leaning on that gate in the dead of winter. Winter’s dregs: is there any time worse? No, there is not. That bit between the wind-down of autumn when the shock of the cold can feel enlivening, and the onset of a spring that never seems to arrive - that�...