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He gave my life rhythm. I measured time by him. Strand Releasing has unveiled an official US trailer for an indie French drama titled Simple Passion, from
HarperCollins, 512pp, £20 When Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space 60 years ago, the KGB wanted to send a bomb with him. The point of the bomb was not that it could be dropped on the US but that, in the event that his Vostok craft came down on foreign soil, Gagarin and his ship could be remotely destroyed. The bomb idea was eventually overruled but, had Gagarin not survived his flight, the world might never have known his name. The same applied to the man who put him in space, Sergei Korolev, whose identity was kept secret until after his death. Korolev, who had been sent to a Sibe...
Today is the 50th anniversary of the death of Stevie Smith. She was 68, and had been suffering from a brain tumour. At the end, her head wrapped in a startling pink turban, she was reported to have amazed visitors by performing her final poem Come Death from her hospital bed. I’ve been keen on Smith ever since I was a teenager, a passion that at one point was so fierce that I was unaccountably moved to give a paper on her at an academic...
Fifty years after the poet’s death, works that were never meant to console are newly resonant