The autumn of 1938 was, if you were British, arguably the most frightening moment of the twentieth century. Louis MacNeice was a poet from Northern Ireland, turning thirty-one and working as a lecturer in London and Autumn Journal, his masterpiece, describes his response to a season of intense anxiety and uncertainty. It’s a diary poem, which frets and argues with itself and blends the personal – a love affair, the daily round in London, the leaves falling and Christmas coming – with the overwhelming and terrifying inevitability of an approaching war. There’s no other poem quite like Autumn Journal, and few which communicate that mixture of dread, distraction and incidental beauty which seems so uncannily descriptive of our own present moment.