W.B.Yeats: A Life, Volume I: The Apprentice Mage 1864 -1914, R.F. Foster, (Oxford University Press, £25). ISBN: 0192117351

If Yeats had many talents, then one was certainly his foresight, or as Roy Foster describes it, ‘that faculty, which always amazed his wife, of knowing how things would look to people afterwards’. But frequently this went further than prophecy: when it came to the question of how he himself might look in retrospect, Yeats … Read more