My own interest started in seeking out what was old. When the guide told me that this was the bed in which Queen Elizabeth slept, I believed him. When owners of country cottages in Suffolk told me their cottage was a thousand years old, I believed them too. I thought that this or that church was the smallest in England, and that secret passages ran under ruined monasteries, so that monks could get to the nearest convent without being seen. The older anything was the lovelier I thought it.' Most famous for his poetry, John Betjeman was also passionate about architecture, 'preferring all centuries to my own'. In his first prose work, Ghastly Good Taste (1933), he vigorously defends his love of Victorian and Edwardian architecture, considered deeply unfashionable at the time. With the savage humour of his famous satire 'Slough', he attacks notions of Modernism and (at the other extreme) unthinking antiquarianism.

Ghastly Good Taste: Or, a Depressing Story of the Rise and Fall of English Architecture (National Trust Classics)

Betjeman, John, Sir

Arts & Photography

David&Charles

Poems by the British writer examine nature and life in the modern world

A Ring of Bells: Poems of John Betjeman Selected for the Younger Reader

Children's Books

Literature & Fiction

John Murray Pubs Ltd

Summoned by Bells

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

John Betjeman: Collected Poems

Poetry

The poetic work of John Betjeman is known both for its range and its mastery of form. Released for the first time in paperback, this selection of his poetry has sold more than two million copies and was awarded the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize.

Church poems

This volume gathers together all of Betjeman's "Church poems," as well as some new poems and others which had previously been out of print. John Betjeman has a stimulaitng way of enlarging any specific scene, not only into his own personal significances, but into those of us all, and never more so than in his Anglican  explorations. In these poems we are shown, with his loving eye for detail and the human element and with his affectionate humour, how inside the confines of a church conjure up a whole parish.

Church Poems

Uncollected Poems

Book Soc of Canada Ltd

The Illustrated Poems of John Betjeman

This work presents a selection of Betjeman's poems. They deal with love of many sorts, with people of all kinds observed with both comedy and pathos, and with the places he has made his own. The illustrations, by David Gentleman, depict the spirit and feeling of place the poet is able to evoke.

The Illustrated Summoned by bells

John Betjeman's verse autobiography has sold more copies than any other English poem of its length this century. The touching story of a boy's growth to early manhood and the mixed joys and guilt of youth, it is also supremely a poem about places, buildings and surroundings - Highgate and Pooterland, t Cornish seaside and Chelsea, Marlborough among its Downs, the quads of Oxford, parish churches and tin advertisements on railway platforms. Who better to illustrate this autobiography than Hugh Casson, architect and former President of the Royal Academy, who has already delighted us with illustrated books on London, Cambridge and Oxford which show him to be as much in love with those places as Betjeman himself. Casson is Beqemz very near contemporary and was a close friend, matching him in passion for all matters architectural and like him a keen observer of the splendid and ridiculous. He has delighted in Summoned by Bells since it first appeared and his illustrations in line and water-colour are a perfect complement to the verse-

The Illustrated Summoned by Bells

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Betjeman, John, Sir. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Betjeman, John, Sir

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Betjeman, John, Sir. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Ghastly Good Taste: Or, a Depressing Story of the Rise and Fall of English Architecture (National Trust Classics)

A Ring of Bells: Poems of John Betjeman Selected for the Younger Reader

Summoned by Bells

John Betjeman: Collected Poems

John Betjeman: Collected Poems

Church Poems

Uncollected Poems

The Illustrated Poems of John Betjeman

The Illustrated Summoned by Bells

The Illustrated Poems of John Betjeman