Born at the start of the twentieth century, John Betjeman later wrote that he always knew he would be a poet.

In time, he would indeed become the most popular Poet Laureate since Tennyson, but he was more than that: as a noted broadcaster and journalist, he also did much to help us appreciate the beauty all around us - in the landscape, in architecture, in churches, on the coast and on the railway.

At once lyrical and humorous, nostalgic and unsentimental, and above all distinctively English, Betjeman is in the first rank of poets to have emerged from these isles in the last century.