Twentieth Century Poems

The Nation's Favourite

A wonderful collection of popular 20th century poetry

However you have come to poetry, whether Sylvia Plath, Maya Angelou or Benjamin Zephaniah appeal more than Walter de la Mare, TS Eliot or Rudyard Kipling, you'll find much here you¹ll want to read, again and again and again.

This lovely book of poetry brings together over 100 of the most celebrated and cherished poems of the 20th century. Including poets as diverse as John Betjeman and Ted Hughes, Siegfried Sassoon and Allan Ahlberg, and subjects from all avenues of life - war, family life, love, death, religion, the countryside, animals and comedy - the whole breadth of the nation's life during the 20th century is encapsulated here. Compiled and edited by Griff Rhys Jones as part of the successful The Nations Favourite Poems series, this book brings together the wealth of new and innovative poetry styles that flourished in the 20th Century.

Exploring Britain's High Places

Mountain

The follow up to the bestselling Semi-Detached.

Griff Rhys Jones was born in 1953. He was educated at Brentwood School and Cambridge University. On the way to becoming a writer, he worked as a security guard, a petrol pump attendant and a television star. Griff is the author of To the Baltic with Bob and Semi-Detached. His TV credits include Not The Nine o' Clock News, Alas Smith and Jones, Restoration and Three Men in a Boat.

Griff Rhys Jones was a mountain virgin. So when it was suggested that he might like to go up a few of Britain&rsquo;s peaks, he rightly asked: isn&rsquo;t there someone better qualified? 
 
Apparently not. So Griff was duly dispatched across the rooftops of England, Scotland and Wales to explore some of the roughest, most arduous &ndash; not to mention most beautiful &ndash; terrain, and to meet those who live daily in such thin-aired wilds. 
 
Climbing the big mountains like Snowdon, Ben Nevis and Scafell Pike and many others besides gave Griff an insight into the passion and devotion our high places inspire &ndash; and turned a mountain virgin into a mountaineer. Well almost &hellip;

Semi-Detached

Warm, impulsive, funny - Griff Rhys Jones takes a trip through his golden age - back to a childhood in the sixties and seventies - by car, by bus, by bicycle, but mostly on foot.

Griff Rhys Jones was born in 1953. He was educated at Brentwood School and Cambridge University. He has worked as a security guard, a petrol-pump attendant and a television star and has written for hundreds of radio and television programmes, and in the press. His To the Baltic with Bob was published by Penguin in 2003.

Semi-detached Griff relives freezing bus journeys to school and the impulsive stealing of that half-a-crown from Charlie Hume&rsquo;s money box; sitting outside Butlins at Clacton (longing to be inside and on the Waltzer instead of stranded on the pebbles with his dad); hazy summer afternoons spent with feral gangs in the woods, or storming the mud flats singing extracts from the Bonzo Dog Dooh Dah Band. The memories are like Mivvis, frozen and fuzzy at the edges, but a sweet jam of pure recollected goo at the centre. 
 
From birth to the BBC, this is a story of a confident middle child. Griff&rsquo;s devoted parents Gwynneth and Elwyn gave him love, security and plenty of asparagus soup from a fake wicker vacuum flask with a plastic top. Griff&rsquo;s father Elwyn, a retiring hospital doctor with a penchant for sweeties and ice-cream, loathed the tedium of English social ritual and hid behind his family and woodwork. From tree houses to boats, puppets to tables, he sawed and hammered his way into his family&rsquo;s affections. 
 
Griff left the bosom of his loving, irascible, eccentric, solid, all engulfing family for the firm embrace of real life; via the Upminster Fun Gang, the Direct Grant System and Party Sevens, losing his virginity down the back of a bunk in a twenty nine foot yacht, discovering the romantic advantages of shared babysitting engagements and the drawbacks of infatuation with identical twins. 
 
If he hadn&rsquo;t moved around so much as a child, would Griff have felt less like a voyeur, looking in on the lighted window across the square, the Georgian house glowing in the sun, the clink of glasses and the bray of public school certainties? Would he be able to tuck in his own shirt? Would he be fully detached? 
 
A laugh-aloud buffet of baby boomer Britain, Griff&rsquo;s self-deprecating, elegant, affectionate prose reveals a little bit better how on earth you got from there to here.

An Epic Misadventure

To the Baltic with Bob

A hilarious travelogue in the style of Michael Palin and Bill Bryson.

Griff Rhys Jones was born in 1953. He was educated at Brentwood school and Cambridge University. On the way to becoming a writer he worked as a security guard, a petrol-pump attendant and a television star.

In the summer of 2002, two profoundly amateur sailors, Griff and Bob, set off in an elderly yacht for Russia, because, on the map, it looked easier than sailing to Cornwall. They took Baines with them, as he knew how to mend the engine. And this is their story. 
 
Over four long months of applied bickering in a vessel no bigger than a London taxi, they visited most of the geographically interesting restaurants on the Baltic seaboard. They sailed, over, and, even at one point, onto the mysterious heart of the Nordic world. They pushed themselves to the very limits of human endurance, before finally agreeing to wash their sleeping bags on a cool cycle at number six. 
 
To the Baltic with Bob is the full account of their stirring journey through the longest heat wave the frozen north has ever suffered; of three men in search of the answer to a troubling question: can you really outmanoeuvre a mid-life crisis by running away to sea?

The Nation's Favourite: Poems

An anthology of inspirational, poignant and funny poems, both old and new, as voted for by the British public

In a nationwide poll to discover Britain's favourite poem, Rudyard Kipling's 'If...' was voted number one.    This unique anthology brings together the results of the poll in a collection of the nation's 100 best loved poems.  Among the selection are popular classics such as Tennyson's 'The Lady of Shallott' and Wordsworth's 'The Daffodils' alongside contemporary poetry such as Allan Ahlberg's 'Please Mrs Butler' and Jenny Joseph's 'Warning'. Also included is the poignant 'Do not Stand at my Grave and Weep'.

Griff Rhys Jones

This wonderful anthology contains some of the nation's all-time favourite comic poetry. From much-loved classics such as Lewis Carroll's curious 'Jabberwocky' to lesser known and forgotten gems such as Gelett Burgess's 'The Purple Cow', Griff Rhys Jones takes us on a poetic tour of witty, nonsensical and plain laugh-out-loud funny poems. The selection brings together poets from every age and every walk of life, from Shakespeare to Victoria Wood and from Keats to Benjamin Zephaniah. There is Roald Dahl's cunning variation on 'Little Red Riding Hood', Spike Milligan's brilliantly ridiculous 'On the Ning Nang Nong' as well as several entries from the ever-elusive Anon, including one delightfully succint 'Peas'. Remembered, half-remembered, cherished or written on a tea towel, here are some of the nation's favourite comic poems.

Nation's Favourite: Comic Poems

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