News at Eleven: One February evening in 2005, 16 people

sat squashed into sagging sofas and a motley collection of chairs in a timber-beamed farmhouse in Devon. As is usual on the first evening of an Arvon course, we were doing the introductions. "Say your name, and something about your shoes," I suggested, borrowing a trick from the writer Philip Hensher, with whom I'd tutored my very first Arvon, also at Totleigh Barton, five years previously. A Palestinian man spoke first. The shoes he had on, he said, were the only ones he could find that didn't hurt. Most shoes hurt because when he was tortured, they "concentrated on legs".

from The Times: A history of the Arvon International Poetry Competition on its 40th anniversary

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