Christopher Hart

A Man of Fine Taste

Horace and Me: Life Lessons from an Ancient Poet

By

Bloomsbury 239pp £16.99 order from our bookshop

Quintus Horatius Flaccus, or Horace as we call him, no longer occupies a central place in our literary landscape. The loss is ours, says the author of this wonderful, touching, highly personal new dual biography. Horace can be your friend for life, as an impressive variety of people have found, from Wordsworth to Voltaire, Petrarch to Brecht, and now Harry Eyres, journalist, wine lover, poet and writer of the ‘Slow Lane’ column in the Financial Times.

Eyres finds many parallels between his own life and the poet’s, and loves his work for its beauty and its philosophical richness. Poetry, like philosophy, should be about ‘how to live and how to die’, not abstruse scholarship or minute textual criticism. This makes Horace and Me one of the very best kinds of ‘How to’ books.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • Tarantino's latest film is 'a fairy tale about Hollywood, where fantasy is an industrial product and the boulevards… ,
    • 'I don’t think we’re here on Earth to be Happy. I think we’re here on Earth to help God. I am a messianic writer'.… ,
    • 'Darley’s book is not a mad dash through this most compelling and complex of English counties. Nor is it another ti… ,
    • 'Moser’s book offers such a gripping account of a profoundly damaged human being, trapped in a cycle of repetition,… ,
    • 'Ideas that I’d thought were set down in full continue to smoulder ... this book is only a snapshot of some larger… ,
    • 'Full of invention which, at its most pedestrian, is eminently Victorian, and at its most unrestrained wildly imagi… ,
    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    Follow Us