‘The Irish Press reviews are good”, the future British poet laureate John Betjeman told the London book publisher Hamish Hamilton in September 1942. Betjeman’s Collected Poems (1958) includes Ireland with Emily, which commemorates a bicycle tour of the nearby Burren with her. Though suspected by the IRA of being a spy, Betjeman was very active socially while based in Dublin. Food rationing was not as severe in Dublin as it was in England, but he wrote to one friend: “Guinness good. A single-column story ran almost the full length of the page under a three-deck headline and it included a photograph.

Source: The Irish Times June 28, 2020 13:07 UTC